Campfyre Stories

Sometimes people say and/or do things that have entirely unintentional results.  In these situations, an apology is almost always warranted and, with few exceptions, accepted by the wronged party.  I have patience for those kinds of situations when I am involved, but I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for the person doing the wronging, at least not in that moment.

You see, I am damn tired of trying to allay the guilt that people have when I have been offended.  I am tired of having to be the one to make people feel better because they have insulted or offended ME.  "If you think that, you don’t know me at all," to my thinking, is entirely unacceptable in response to having said or done something to hurt another person, whether it was intentional or not.

I make every effort to give people the benefit of the doubt.  Often, to my own detriment.  But when it comes to the people I love, I am incredibly forgiving.  Unless the same wrong has been committed repeatedly and apologies have been rendered meaningless, I can step away from an offense, insult, etc. and move on, but when that offense or insult is perpetuated by an "I’m sorry, BUT…" or an accusation that I was purposely misunderstanding, it becomes something I cannot accept.

I am HARD to offend.  I am hard to insult and, frankly, even when I am hurt, offended or insulted, I will often pretend that I wasn’t.  It’s easier to assume that it was unintentional and lick my wounds in the privacy of my thoughts.  I’m not nearly as confrontational as people seem to think I am.

My friends are almost entirely very sarcastic people with slicing senses of humor.  I can take a lot, but no matter how sarcastic you are, no matter how thick-skinned, no matter how much you can take, there are ALWAYS things that are off-limits.  Sometimes you can find those things through trial and error.  Sometimes you need to cross the line to know where it is, but once you’ve found it, back off and move on.  The worst possible thing that you can do to anyone is stand on that line claiming that it shouldn’t be there.

People who think they know me really well are actually only let in a very small way.  I would have to say that, outside of my family, there are only two people that I trust enough to know what goes on deep inside, and those people have proven their loyalty, trustworthiness and friendship many times over, in ways that, to this day, still surprise me.  Everyone else knows very little and many think they know me through and through.

Strength, temperament, dreams, problems, jealousies, my personal history…  all of these are things that I keep from the vast majority of people I know.  Most of that is out of self-defense.  I have had these things used against me when I trusted more indiscriminately in my early 20’s.  The concept that my friends have of who I am is skewed because I am afraid that they will use these things against me, and some of them have come close.

There is a certain measure of competition that I feel among some of my closest friends.  And it’s a competition of who has it worst.  If something is bad, then someone will have something that trumps it, belittling the problem at hand.  Or they will have been in a similar situation and therefore assume that they know and understand what I’m going through, even when the situations are vastly different in detail.

I look around at the people I consider my friends and many of them, at this point in time, are doing really well.  Most of the pieces of the puzzle of happiness are in place and here I am still worrying about things that are no longer as much of a concern to them.  I try not to be jealous.  Envy isn’t really all that much in my nature, but when I am belittled or mocked for not having the things they (mostly) take for granted, it hurts that much more.  And, believe me, it takes an awful lot to get me to the point of hurt-and-you-know-it.

So I stew.  And I lick my wounds.  And I take the time to attempt to get over, not even the hurt, but the outrage directed at me for daring to be hurt by someone who says that I don’t know her at all.  I guess I don’t.  But I would have to go so far as to say that if anyone thinks that I’m going to try to assuage the guilt that someone has for hurting me, whether intentionally or not, then they don’t know ME at all.

The shame of it all is that this is the sort of thing that has lost me friends in the past.