Still Human

“Never regret being a good person, to the wrong people. Your behavior says everything about you, and their behavior says enough about them.”

Marc and Angel

I think that the greatest disservice you can do to a person is put them on a pedestal and expect them to be perfect.

The best way to destroy something beautiful is by comparing it to something else.

First of all, I just want to say that I don’t know everything, but all I’m trying to do is share what I’ve learned so far in my life and hopefully give you new perspective.

One of the biggest mistakes in my life has been making another person so great in my head that if they ever do anything wrong, I am extremely disappointed.

I’m going to be completely honest with you because that’s the only way to gain trust and credibility. It’s the only way you’re going to believe even a word that I say.

One of the worst things that ever happened to me was partially attributed to the fact that I made someone out to be a person she was not.

We were super close. Growing up, this was probably my most important relationship outside of my relationships with my family. It could be argued that she did things that caused our friendship to fall apart, but the reason they affected me so much was because I saw her out as someone who couldn’t do any wrong. We rarely fought, we were the image of what best friends were supposed to be. In my head, the comparisons were always rolling.

And that leads me to my second point. The greatest disservice you can do to yourself is blame yourself for your mistakes or your lacking in an area of your life.

I think I started resenting her the second I let go of the idea of us being close. She was perfect at everything and I was not. She was beautiful and I was normal. She got the best grades and I was just average. I was not special when I compared myself to her.

But that didn’t mean I was right.

The thing that pulled the comparison over the edge was when she got into the “perfect relationship”. I could fudge over the other things I lacked. I could show her my riding ribbons whenever she mentioned her assortment of accomplishments. I could think about the one time my teacher complimented my work as she complained about an A- in Chemistry on one test (I fought hard to get a B in that class). I would do whatever I could to look halfway decent for the few days we would spend together to feel somewhat comparable. But I couldn’t just create a halfway decent relationship out of thin air.

To make matters worse, I had some other things going on at school that made me feel even more inadequate in comparison to all of her working out relationships. I felt lonely and isolated. I went through my darkest period of time.

And then I found a new group of people to put on a pedestal.

It started out innocently enough. In fact, that was honestly the problem.

I was naive and assumed that because one friend was kind, the rest would be too. But in reality, I was left emptier and lonelier than ever before. And I attribute much of those feelings to the fact that I expected them to be perfect. After all, that was the image they seemed to want to project. I was as nice as I could be to them (albeit a bit shyly), and after they dumped me, I regretted ever trusting them.

Maybe I shouldn’t have trusted them. I definitely shouldn’t have had such high opinions of them. But I should never regret being kind to them.

Going back to the friend I was originally speaking of, for a while I regretted being friends with her at all. But the more I think about it now, with over a year under my belt from the incident, the more I feel grateful that I had that experience.

You heard me. Grateful. I’m grateful because it taught me exactly what that quote said. The moments I will regret the most are the ones where I’m unkind to people, no matter if they were nice to me or not. I know that I have looked weird or naive for being kind to people who have hurt me, but I will always know in my heart that the reason I was being nice after everything was not because I expected them to somehow change. Rather, I was simply realizing that the only way to have a life worth living is having love for others.

The most important part to remember is that you can’t blame yourself for how other people act towards you. You don’t have to blame yourself for your past when it’s time to move on. If someone breaks your trust, it isn’t your fault. If you loved someone that turns on you, it’s not your fault. It’s a reflection of who they truly are inside. The only one who can reflect who you are inside is YOU.

“Let all that you do be done in love.”

1 Corinthians 16:14