Confronting discomfort is giving me strength in a world where perfect strangers can render me powerless. –Veronica Larsen, Enamor

For most of my young adult life, I very seriously wanted to be one of two things: a country singer reminiscent of Faith Hill or Trisha Yearwood, or a person responsible for holding other people accountable for their actions. A person tired from long days of putting unwashed miscreants behind bars, hell bent on keeping the streets safe and free of criminals, and on an incessant mission to make the world a better place. A better place for myself, and others like me. A better place for our children and their children. A better place for the elderly, the perpetually homeless, and those other populations who can’t really protect themselves.

A person like Jane Rizzoli or Debra Morgan. A tough cookie. A good detective. Someone that people underestimate because she’s under five foot five.

I know you guys are probably all going to laugh so hard you pee your Victoria’s Secret panties when I say this but I always wanted to be a homicide detective or some sort of FBI employee. I know, right? Could you just picture someone like me carrying a weapon or assertively assaulting someone? Reading someone their rights and letting them know that one of them is to opt to keep their mouth shut? Walking into a methamphetamine laboratory and knowing exactly where to step so I don’t get my entire body blown off?

Yeah, me neither. But there is something so enticing about putting bad people down, about forcing them to take responsibility for their illicit wrongdoings. There is something really motivating and comforting about confronting someone you know is dead wrong and enabling them to verbally correct themselves in your presence. Maybe it even makes you feel a little powerful, to know that you were smart enough to know they were lying to or misleading you.

The truth is that I like to be right, to say I told you so. I like to [appropriately] punish people for what they've done detrimentally wrong, to catch them in the act, to make them pay. Not in the sense that I’m going to become some morbid vigilante or moonlight as Batman but I’m not one of those people that believes individuals can just continually skate away their offenses. It isn’t fair that some individuals are continually forgiven for being repeat offenders, while others are made to stand trial and face their mistakes.

You shouldn’t get to rear-end the car in front of you and drive away. You shouldn’t get to beat your children over and over again and still get to keep them in your custody. You shouldn’t get arrested for umpteen DUIs and then somehow get your stupid license back. You shouldn’t have to do drug or alcohol rehab more than once because clearly, if you’ve fallen off the wagon after treatment, it wasn’t successful the first time.

You shouldn’t be allowed to make the same mistake over and over again because if you do, it’s no longer a mistake, friends. If you accomplish something more than once, there’s intent. And that’s the shit I won’t stand for. You don’t just get to throw your hands up in the air and say, “I’m sorry,” to me over and over again. No, you aren’t sorry. Because if you were really sorry, you wouldn’t have done it.

Maybe that's why I became a domestic violence advocate in child safety. I like to hold people to a moral standard. I feel like they owe it to themselves.

The truth is that with a personality like mine, it’s easy for other people to take advantage. I find sometimes that my kindness is mistaken for weakness and people just go out of their way to make me look like a pathetic idiot. Sometimes I feel like I’m coming down too hard on people when I try to command respect from them but the reality is that I shouldn’t have to continually do that. I shouldn’t have to beg people to be honest with me and I shouldn’t feel guilty about confronting them on their bullshit. It’s not like I believe myself to be some sort of gospel speaker but I expect to get back what I put out. And it can be infuriating to realize that people are just so easily willing to walk all over you. To realize that people can just lie to you so naturally.

And you know, I’ve never really understood that. People always act like I’m this pushover who would never stand up for myself. Sometimes I think that people are under the hilarious misconception that they can just treat me in whatever way they please and say things to deliberately hurt my feelings. I’ve dealt with this my whole life and I just want to clarify a couple of things: just because I haven’t burned a house down, or jumped across a table when someone was rude to me doesn’t mean that I accepted the shit they were talking. Just because I’m a lady who doesn’t act completely erratically every time I get upset doesn’t mean that I’m just okay with being treated like a second class citizen. Just because I’m oftentimes pretty easy going and choose not to embarrass people when I catch them in incessant lies or inaccurate information doesn’t mean that I condone shady behavior. It just means that I’m above it all and don’t have time to be a trifling troublemaker. My clothes are way too expensive and my life is way too valuable to be getting in fights and getting arrested. Get your facts straight. 

But you know what I’ve come to realize after thirty years of trying to be the “nice” one? You know what I’ve taken away from thirty years of trying to be easy and agreeable? You know what lesson I’ve learned from continually forgiving people and allowing them back in my life just to endure them making the same recurrent mistakes?

I ain’t about it, friends. It’s such a waste of time. And the worst part is that the people who do those things, they’re never affected. I’m always the one that’s left hurting because I took three seconds to care about them. #socialworkerproblems

There can be no progress without head on confrontation. –Christopher Hitchens

Here’s the thing: I'm super tired of being walked all over because it seems to happen a lot. I'm tired of making excuses for people when they’re shitty to me because for whatever reason, I don’t want to give up on them. It just doesn’t seem fair that I’m constantly worried about the proverbial relationship because of the off-kilter things that they do. I hate to sound hurtful but it's probably about time these individuals take some ownership. I can’t do everything on my own and honestly, continually making excuses for their behavior and relentlessly forgiving them their transgressions probably isn’t doing anything to better their character.

Many, many moons ago, I was friends with this woman who was a little bit younger than me. We worked together and she was well on her way to having a couple of kids. We had grown up around the same area, had a few of the same friends, and had gone to the same high school.

I didn’t get really close with her until after high school because work had brought us together. She was friendly enough to me, even though we hadn’t run in the same circles initially, and eventually we ended up becoming relatively close friends. She had always confided in me, even things that she had never told anybody else. (I must have a trustworthy face because I feel like that happens a lot to me. People seem to flock to me with their secrets and honestly, I’m alright with it. There are worse things to be considered than reliable.) She had even told me about how she was gradually starting this affair with a man we had gone to high school with (who had since moved out of state), in the hopes that they would eventually get together. She had told me this, without any hesitation, even though her fiancé (and the father to one of her children) worked really close to where we did and was up visiting us all the time. She trusted me that much to tell me a secret that would literally change her whole life if it ever got out.

Of course I would never tell. She was a good friend of mine and it wasn’t my job to be airing her dirty laundry. But I just never thought that was the point. I always felt like it constantly put me in a strange situation because my boyfriend at the time and I always hung out with her and her fiancé. All the while, I knew that every time her phone played I Luv Your Girl by the Dream, it was because that out of state man was texting her.

There were more things than just the affair with the man out of state, however. She acted out in a few other ways, as well, and it eventually became a problem for her in the employment world. To be honest, the details of all that went down are a little fuzzy because it was a lot of years ago. But from what I remember, she was fired. For what, I can’t really recall. (And just as a disclaimer: it could be that she was pushed out and quit. Who really remembers? I don’t want to soil her employment reputation so I’ll just say that I can’t remember. Because I honestly can’t.)

But one of the things that happened shortly after all of her trouble started, and she was either unemployed or working somewhere else that none of us knew about, is that her kids took the brunt of the trouble. I remember one day, everyone was frantic because she had dropped off her children at their respective fathers’ houses and then just never came back to get them.

I remember thinking, and I was really young back then but had tons of experience with children (including her children), that I was so angry at her for just abandoning her children that way. She didn’t seem to have the brain power (at the time) to realize that she was really hurting them, and in turn, just hurting herself. I’m sure she had some logical reason why she had just dropped them off with no plans to pick them up because up until that point, she had actually been a really good mother. Even if she was really young when they were born. I just remember that a little while after all of that had happened, she came to pick up her W2 and I couldn’t even look at her. I just wanted to scream at her, “Do you know how lucky you are to even have children? If I was your children’s father(s), I would make sure you never saw your kids again!”

But I obviously knew that I would be unable to formulate a response appropriate of someone who used to be “her girl” so I just acted like I didn’t even see her. Seemed like a better choice than screaming like a lunatic in front of a bunch of children at a school in which I was employed.

I don’t know what ever ended up happening to her, to be honest, because we have basically just lost touch. I know she ended up breaking things off with both of those aforementioned men, had some more kids, had some eventual dealings with child protective services and the legal system, and seems to have grown up a lot since. It seems like now, after nearly a decade, she finally has her shit together but as I’ve said before, you can only tell so much via Facebook. People always put their best foot forward with social media, don’t they?

Confrontation is what happens when you’re less than honest and get caught. –Barbara Delinsky, Blueprints

I had another experience similar to the one mentioned above with a male friend of mine.

Originally, we were super compatible as friends. We liked a lot of the same television shows, we enjoyed the same genres of music, and we had tons of the same interests. We had similar ethnic backgrounds and still had family back in the old county. We always talked about how non-Italian Americans used the term “gravy” when what they really meant was sauce and then we would contemplate different ways to abuse them if we ever heard that ridiculous term again. Sometimes we would fight over who cooked better family style Italian food and I would usually end up laughing because that man barely pumped his own gas. (I will never understand how men survive the single life. That’s probably why they gain so much weight when they’re “comfortable and happy” in relationships. It’s because they’re finally eating for the first time.)

I used to think that he was this really cool, swarthy gentleman with great taste in watches. I used to tell my husband and all of my friends that I couldn’t understand how this man was single when he clearly had so many awesome things to offer. I even had selected a few of my female friends that I thought would be compatible for him. Thank goodness I never followed through on any of that.

But as time went on, I started to see a really different side of him. What I thought was originally a kind and well-mannered human being, I soon learned was actually an infant man child who threw actual fits when he didn’t get what he wanted. Sure, he was polite and kind and could maintain a genuinely intelligent conversation [when things were going his way]. But as soon as his lies started to catch up with him or the ball was no longer in his court, he was like an explosive, insensitive animal.

When he was confronted on anything even remotely discrediting to the image he tried to maintain for himself, he was like a cornered raccoon. He became a completely different person. Kind of an asshole, actually.

It took me a really long time to actually do anything about it because this man wasn’t my boyfriend; he was just my friend. What right did I really have to call him on his absolutely incessant bullshit? He was just someone that, as of recently, had become someone I talked to fairly regularly. He was someone that I considered a close friend, someone that I considered of value, but not a person I would necessarily put above anyone else in my life. I struggled for a long time about whether or not I should put him in his place because I would tell myself, he doesn’t have to listen to me; I’m not one of his “boys”, I’m not a family member, I’m not someone who’s been romantically linked with him. But the more and more I thought about it, the more I realized that I would absolutely not be talked to so derogatorily by a man that really wasn’t that high on my list of priorities.

I started to realize that it didn’t matter how many “bad days” he had; I wasn’t just some piece of garbage that he could kick around when he was irritated. It soon became clear that it didn’t matter how many alleged brain scans he had had for the supposed medical issue he was dealing with; I wasn’t just some person that he could talk down to when he was feeling overwhelmed. It became super obvious, as well, that no matter how many goddamn lies I caught this low-caliber individual in, he was never going to be honest with me. And if that was the case, this man had never respected me. Why would I ever want to be friends with someone who couldn’t even respect me enough to try to be honest with me once in a while?

Why was I wasting my time with someone who didn’t even value me enough as a person to tell the truth even once? It seemed like the entire concept of honesty was very foreign to him; he just sort of bounced from nonsense story to nonsense story and seemed to get by with his great dimples. But once you really got down to the core person he was, there was nothing worth staying around for. He couldn’t be honest with anyone to save his own life. It was clear in basically every aspect of his life.

For a while, I sort of felt bad about the way I had left things. I was angry and had sort of lashed out on him because I was sick of him disrespecting my marriage and my husband, exhausted of always wondering whether or not anything he rambled on about was even true, and angry at myself for taking this much time to even care about it. I was thinking that I shouldn’t have had to work that hard for the truth, I shouldn’t have had to work that hard at a genuine friendship, and I certainly didn’t have to take his shit.

I had taken a lot less crap from people I liked a lot more and quite frankly, he was starting to really piss me off. Now that a lot of time has passed, I know that I made the right move but a small sliver of me still feels guilty because that’s just my personality. The other day, after I had already started this blog with the intentions of using this life experience, I saw a really nasty Facebook argument on his business page between him and a former’s employee’s family member. I know I shouldn’t have but I actually took the time to go through and read all of the back and forth comments.

Two grown men arguing over some bullshit regarding poor business strategies. On Facebook.

Yeah, I’m okay with closing that chapter of my life.

Moral of the Crazy: I have to be real with you, friends. I’m not on any kind of high horse; I don’t think that I’m perfect, by any stretch of the imagination. But I embrace my flaws and I genuinely try to be better every day. I wake up every day and think about what I can do differently, what I can do better, and how I can be better to the people I care about. I don’t like conflict, I don’t like dishonesty, and I don’t like being overly assertive and forcing myself to assess an individual’s character but sometimes, it’s just got to be done.

I could easily make any relationship work because I’m the type of person who can look past things. I can forgive essentially anyone and I can believe them when they tell me that last time was the last time. I think that’s why I get hurt sometimes when it comes to friendships because I have this mentality that I shouldn’t judge or hold grudges. I mean, who am I to dictate what’s appropriate behavior and what isn’t? I can only sincerely grasp my own world view. That’s all any of us can really do unless we’ve stepped in someone else’s shoes.

But at the same time, I have this issue with looking like an idiot. I shouldn’t have to be constantly second guessing myself because one of the individuals I’ve chosen to be friends with is a pathological liar. I shouldn’t have to Google someone’s mugshot because they lied to me once about their age. I shouldn’t have to defend myself by saying that I’m [happily] married and live with another person. I shouldn’t have to curb my language when I hang out with a girlfriend because she has chosen to cheat on her fiancé. I shouldn’t have to keep my mouth shut for fear of getting terminated because some girlfriend of mine just didn’t pick up her children one day. I shouldn’t have to take ten minutes out of my really busy day to read a father’s rantings on Facebook because some asshole didn’t pay his daughter in a timely fashion.

I mean, these are not good qualities to be found in people. These are things that should be confronted and shut down because it’s not fair to anyone. And while I know I’m not the end-all be-all of human interactions and behavior, I go out of my way to be honest and not make the same mistakes over and over again. I mean, the fact that people are trying to put you on blast in a public arena means they’re pretty desperate to speak on your character. And it’s just like I’ve said a million times, if all these people are claiming the same things about you, it’s not all those people that are lying and inaccurate.

It’s YOU. YOU’RE the liar. YOU’RE the cheater. YOU’RE the one who lies so much you can’t seem to keep all your goddamn stories straight. YOU’RE the one with the legal issues and the business troubles and YOU’RE the one that needs to get their shit together.

Not the rest of us, so sorry. It’s probably time to either move to a new state and start your life all over again [full of fresh faces that aren’t aware of your constant bullshit] or start making some changes. Because pretty soon you’re going to run out of people to screw over. At least in this county.

My biggest pet peeve is when you confront an individual, which honestly takes a lot of courage, especially if you’re close friends with that person, and they violate you again by either maintaining the lie or acting all exasperated that you would ever doubt them. As if catching them in a lie or some other act of injustice has somehow hurt their feelings. They seem to have absolutely no regard for the fact that you’re a little miffed because someone that is supposed to be your friend fucking lied right to your face. I will just never understand I guess.

Look, we’ve all made mistakes. And I’m sure, at some point, we’ve all been caught in a lie that left us really embarrassed. But here’s the thing: it’s okay to make mistakes and although I personally don’t make a habit of lying, sometimes shit happens and you lie out of convenience or being scared. All of that is normal, human behavior but it’s what you do when you’re confronted with it that makes you a good person or a shitty one.

If you own your mistakes and your lies, whether they’re little or not, you’re taking a step to be more honest. If you were to say, “You know what? I did lie about my age because I’m a self-doubting man child and sometimes my insecurities get the best of me. It was stupid and I’m sorry,” I would probably still think it was a goddamn stupid reason to lie but I would forgive you. Maybe I would even make a snarky joke about that being the reason women lie about their weight.

If you were to say, “You know what? I couldn’t deal with my kids at that moment and I thought it was better to leave them with their respective fathers until I could grow up and get my shit together,” I would still disagree with you but I would respect you for your honesty. Maybe I would even make a joke about alcohol, citing allegedly bratty children as a reason why people drink.

If you were to say, “You know what? Your check is going to be a little bit late because I’m having some sort of legal issues and the goddamn stingy government is garnishing all my wages. But I promise you, when I get paid, you’ll get paid,” I would probably still be livid because I didn’t realize I was working for free but I would understand because sometimes life happens. I know that people don’t open businesses with the mentality that they’re just not going to pay their employees. I know from a personal childhood experience that when you don’t pay your taxes, it might take a while but the government will catch on and they will take everything. I would probably make a joke about Wesley Snipes and say that even actors can’t dodge the tax man.

I mean, it’s just that, when you’re honest, people are far more willing to help you in any way they can. They’re far more willing to extend a listening ear because maybe they didn’t realize that your entire life was falling apart. They’re far more willing to be understanding of whatever bullshit reason you have for acting like a complete child because you respected them enough to be real with them. I just think that confrontation is not the way you should want things to go. It isn’t good for anyone and the longer those mistakes press on your conscious, the worse it’s all going to be when the truth gets out.

If you are ever in the situation where you’re getting confronted, I really hope you have the strength and mature mentality to just own whatever happened. It can be comforting to know that there aren’t any secrets. If you’re ever in a situation where you’re doing the confronting, I hope the person you’re confronting is completely honest with you. Because you deserve it.

And I hope that mother fucker squirms under the truth.   

Strange continent immune to all reason and I’m flattered by your grey matter. –Jewel, Grey Matter