2008-06-10

Mean Girls

Recently, I've come to grips with a certain unsavory part of my personality.

I'm mean.

Oh, I offer my seat on the subway to pregnant women, and talk to the Greenpeace canvassers standing outside of Symphony Hall in the boiling heat, and flirt with babies in the supermarket. To those people, I am the epitome of niceness.

I'm the worst kind of mean. I'm the quiet, glowering type. I'm the person who, when running into an ex and his significant other, will silently and viciously weigh said S.O. and find her sorely wanting. Doesn't matter if the breakup was amicable. I will imagine that she has flabby upper arms, split ends, and a CD collection full of Celine Dion and Seal. And for a brief second, I will feel superior. And then I will feel like shit.

I spent a good chunk of my formative years being picked on. That's the nicest way to put it. It's closer to the truth to say that I was regularly tormented. Everything about me was picked apart and scattered about. The way I sat in my chair. The way I ate my lunch. And when the school day proved insufficient to get all possible jabs in, the girls in my class started calling me at home, at night and on weekends, in case my time spent away from them got me to thinking that I wasn't a fat, ugly spaz.

And so I vowed that I would never be deliberately mean to anyone. I understood, on some level, that the reason I was being teased had maybe just a bit more to do with the fact that the girls who were doing the teasing had their own problems than it did with the fact that I WAS, admittedly, a spaz. Because within that circle of girls, there was invariably one that would fall out of favor for a period of time, during which she would eat lunch with me, laugh at my dumb jokes and wonder aloud why everyone was so mean to me...until she was granted access once again to the inner sanctum, and then it was as if nothing had ever happened.

So I realized that being ugly to another person was really a manifestation of some internal hurt. And I still try to be mindful of that; it's just harder to apply it to myself a lot of times.

And it's a horrible place to be stuck in, that mindset where you're silently cutting someone down to make yourself feel like less of a dumpy, cellulite-ridden shitbag. Trashing someone you don't even know because you perceive, somehow, that this person is actually better than you because she has nicer hair, a bigger paycheck, or the guy that you went out with a zillion years ago and wouldn't go out with again if you were paid.

I think sometimes I'm just incapable of giving myself a little more credit without winding up monsooning all over my little mental parade. Or accepting that I am exactly where I'm supposed to be, and loved by exactly the right people. I don't really know when it was that I picked up the very habit I swore I would never pick up, but I do know that I picked it up because it seemed quicker and easier than the alternative. I'm working on it.

But I bet I'm right about the Celine Dion. Jesus...

lisamcc at 6:41 p.m.

4 comments so far
Jess
2008-06-11 05:01:59
I struggle with this all the time. I don't want to become a bitter and mean old woman, y'know? But making fun of people is, well, really fun! And cathartic. And funny. I still laugh my ass off when Pibb does his impression of the guy who did our wood floors 3 years ago. I'm seriously laughing right now just thinking about it. hee hee "The Wicker Man," he called him. I don't know why. I guess we have to find that line between it being funny and cathartic and it just being cruel and mean. I find myself towing that line all the time.
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voodoo
2008-06-11 12:51:00
It's really good that you can work all that stuff out though.
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vikkitikkitavi
2008-06-11 16:03:39
Hm, sounds like you lived your very own version of "Mean Girls." Before you know it, you be in rehab, eschewing underwear, and designing your own line of signature leggings. I would like to point out that your supposed meanness to other people appears to take place INSIDE YOUR OWN HEAD. That is a significant difference, you know.
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Jess
2008-06-11 20:42:08
I second what Vikki said. It's not like you're calling the ex's girlfriend anonymously whispering "Hey arm fatty! Having fun listening to your Celine Dion albums while running your fingers through your fried hair? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!" click. Um. Are you?
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