I've been told, many times in my life, that I'm a nice person.
It's not entirely true, of course. I am not always nice. I make snap judgments, I get annoyed, I climb up on my high horse and to heck with what anybody else says. I have raised stubbornness to an art form. I've been unkind - sometimes repeatedly - to people I've called my friends. I've lost friends - driven them away, or let them go.
But I know what people mean when they say it. They mean I'm cheerful, and I don't let day-to-day things rattle me all that much. I'm forgiving of the small stuff and the stuff that wasn't intended. I have my lines, and some of them don't do me much credit; but if the lines aren't crossed, I'm generally not bothered.
I realized today, as I was reading one of my bulletin boards, that I was looking for entertainment in the snarky posts of others. There's a lot of polarization on this particular set of message boards, and many of the people with whom I agree can write articulate, well-thought-out posts. They can also write biting sarcasm and vicious insults. And I enjoy reading them. Why shouldn't I, when the folks on the other side do the same?
What am I becoming?
Insults are insults. Nastiness is nastiness. In discussions as polarized as these are, nobody ever persuades anybody else. It's often impossible to get past semantic games to figure out exactly what the disagreement is. Everybody participates in this willingly and vociferously. And I've become the sort of person who enjoys watching other people get insulted.
"Enjoys" is overstating it, of course. It's like picking a scab - you can't resist, and it feels weirdly good when you do it; but then you're bleeding again and it's just as raw as it was before. Sometimes it even gets worse. It's one quick hit of nastiness and self-satisfaction, and then you're hammered with retaliatory nastiness from the other side.
I don't want to be that person. I don't want to condone ANYBODY'S nastiness, including my own. I don't want to pick that scab; I want it to heal, so the next time I get scratched I recognize that it's not good for me.
Enough with the analogies.
I've made a lot of mistakes in my life, and most of those mistakes don't involve being nice. I would really like to be a nice person - to live up to my husband's image of me, and to give my daughter a good role model. Of course, maybe what I'm saying is that i want to be kind, which is a little different. One can be kind without being nice; being nice sometimes means being a doormat. (I don't recommend that, by the way.) Being kind means you're forthright with people, but if you have to give them bad news you give it to them with an effort to cause them as little harm as possible. It does NOT mean concealing hurtful things, or forgiving someone you really can't forgive. It just means not adding insult to injury.
Kind is better. I think I'd rather be kind.