It's Not Me. It's You. (Or Them)

This post got me thinking. 

And not in a bad way, in the way that some of the comments on the Internet often do. 

But rather, about how people can really be jerks in how they treat and speak to other people. 

I've always wondered whether I was truly just an awful horrible person who was incompetent at everything, or whether I've just had the misfortune of being around people constantly who truly suck. 

The post in question reminded me of a former colleague. She seemed to have a backhanded way of saying everything. "Look at you getting a sweat there!" she'd comment when she saw me after a workout in the building's gym. Or, talking about food habits, "Well, you always like to eat a lot of meat, don't you?" Because she'd picked up on the habit that I made a roast on the weekend... but she didn't realize that well, I then didn't cook meat at all during the week.

It took me a long, long time to realize that no, I wasn't a horrible person for making a roast once a week. And I wasn't fat and out of shape because she happened to see me put in a tough walking workout. (I mean, I was fat and out of shape compared to today, but I was in better shape than she was.)

To the contrary, she was just an awful person who liked to put other people down. All. The. Damn. Time. (I mean, admittedly she would also lie about where she was during the work day, so I probably should have realized that I was not the awful person here.)

An isolated incident with a bad person I could probably tolerate. But I've never been very good at separating the bad and awful people's opinions of me from my own perception. 

And reading that thread made me realize. Yeah, people are just awful. 

• The people who decided that I needed to be in remedial gym (protip: when you've got chronically tight hamstrings and it turns out that endurance is your thing, it doesn't mean that you just generally suck at athletics)
• The parental units who went along with it (and similarly, the paternal unit who told me girls in middle school didn't have "tummies," and the maternal unit who, this past Thanksgiving, told me she didn't want to hinder my meal habits...)
• The choir director who called me busty
• The tennis instructor at Wellesley who told me I had the hand-eye coordination of a toad (almost 20 years later, this one still doesn't make sense)
• The dietitian who cut me to 3 ounces of protein a day, with no supplementation in other areas ... and thinking that even though I was active, since I wasn't thin, it didn't matter 
• The dietitian who said that if I was serious about losing weight, I should restrict to under 1,000 calories a day, and consider meal replacement shakes (when discussing both of these with the Dietitian, she made a face and comment that basically came down to "Great, now I get to fix the problem these people created")
• The person who asked "who intentionally places grey hair"; corollary: the person who starts sentences with "I don't want to harsh your mellow..."

An interesting thing I've been experiencing over the past 18 months of therapy (wow, I've actually stuck with this now longer than I did the first go-round on U.S. soil...) is that I have less and less of a tolerance for people who bother me. 

I used to think that maybe I just had less and less of a tolerance for being bothered, and that that was a sign of weakness, but I'm starting to see it as maybe a reinforcement of boundaries. 

After all, why should I give people the space to bother me, and to let their intentionally hurtful words actually bother me?

It's not OK to be a jerk, and I'm not going to let the negative people in my life continue to act like jerks toward me. If that means that people exit my life in that process, I'm OK with that.