It’s always easy to complain about things, much easier than actually doing something to alleviate what you are complaining about. I know this because I seem to complain a lot, at least according to those who know me. I whine about how boring Rochester is. I bitch about how I have so much to do at work. I moan about how I hate driving places. When I think about it, usually whenever anything even mildly annoys me, I have the urge to complain.
I’ve often used this blog as a place to air many of my complaints, often simply because I didn’t want to complain to people lest they think I’m nothing more than a whiner and I didn’t want to keep everything completely bottled up, as I do with many other negative emotions. Do something that annoys me and makes me want to complain, I’ll just air it out on my blog or blab about it to a friend. Do something that genuinely pisses me off and gets me angry… well, I’ll not do a damn thing.
Well, I may fume and be a little more anti-social, but that’s about it. I hate confrontation and I hate expressing anger, mainly because when I have I’ve done things and said things that I wish I hadn’t. I don’t want to hurt anyone, no matter how they’ve hurt me. Wait, actually I usually do want to utterly decimate the person who hurt me, but I never act on it.
For me, I always rationalize my lack of expressing anger towards someone in that it is better for only one person to be hurting than for two, and I am a strong person so I can take it. Of course this is totally unhealthy and has allowed me to be walked all over many times in my life, but I really can’t stand to hurt another human being, even if that human doesn’t mind causing me a little pain.
I remember one instance in particular that illustrates perfectly how I handle things. In high school one of my friends, and I use the term friend loosely here since I didn’t have many true friends in high school, decided that it would be fun to give me a somewhat negative nickname. It pissed me off since no one really likes to be called names, but I let it go and pushed down my anger.
Later on in high school this friend did something really stupid and developed his own pejorative nickname. Every kid that this friend of mine had ever made fun of threw that nickname at him every chance they got. They were out for blood and it made them feel so damn good to be getting even.
I didn’t call him that nickname, though. He’d hurt me a ton, true, but I couldn’t bring myself to hurt him in return. No, I just called him by his name. I couldn’t bring myself to be nasty, to be mean, to be callous… I only realized how much I had been hurt and how I wouldn’t want anyone to hurt like I did, even if they caused me pain.
I realize now that by not ever trying to get even, by never wanting to cause anyone pain, or trying to start a conflict that I have been taken advantage of over and over again. People see a nice guy and that tells them they can walk all over him if they so choose and he’ll still be there in the end, positive as ever. The only difference, which you people who take advantage of us nice guys don’t know, is that deep down we’re all a little more cold and little more empty, you just don’t know it because you’re too concerned about getting only what you want.
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