D@mned If You Do, D@mned If You Don't

Blogspiration: You Can't

This is my first time posting for Blogspiration, but it looked like fun.  Anyway, when I saw this week's Blogspiration posted by Kristen Feliz, I felt like it was written for me specifically and I just had to respond to her post.  I never fit in when I was growing up.  It seemed like everything I did was seen as slightly wrong by the people around me.   I seemed to be living on a different wavelength than everyone else.  Those judging eyes seemed to be on me all the time.  Maybe that's why this spoke to me, and I just had to address that.  You know how it feels when you're just compelled to write something?  It's like an itch that just has to be scratched.

The truth of the matter is, extremes are unhealthy.  If you eat too much or too little, it's genuinely bad for you.  And though reading is wonderful, at least in my humble opinion, if you never do anything else, you'll miss out on a lot that life has to offer.  Even so, most people who find themselves cast under the harsh light of judgment are not behaving in an extreme way.  People often make an assumption based on imperfect data.  It can come from one look at what the person is wearing, or from hearing a rumor.  People jump to conclusions all too often and use that as a justification for dismissing an entire human being.

In writing this, I hope that people who may be too quick to rush to judgment carefully consider all the other possibilities for what they see or hear.  When you see a single mother of two using food stamps in the store to buy groceries, there's no need to write her off as lazy or promiscuous, because you don't necessarily know her story.  Maybe she's a widow who's struggling to pick up the pieces.  Maybe she can only work part time while she goes to school so she can end up getting a better job to support her kids.  And sure, maybe she was promiscuous.  After all, it's always possible.  Now here's the question.  Does that make her any less of a human being?  Does that mean she can't ever make anything of herself?  We all make mistakes.  We all stumble sometimes.    We don't like it when strangers point out our mistakes, do we?

So why do we do it?  Why do we seek out the faults of others?  I think we judge others we don't know so we can feel better about our own mistakes.  We can't forget the things that we've done wrong, but we can assume the worst in others so, in comparison, we don't look so bad.  I may have crashed the car, but at least I didn't XYZ . . .


I think we're all guilty of it.  I know I've done it, though I'm not proud of that fact.  What I take away from all this is it's pointless to agonize about how others see us, because people rush to judgment without all the facts anyway.  You're d@mned if you do and d@mned if you don't, as they say.  You cannot please everyone, so it's a fruitless endeavor to try, and in the end it will only wear you down.  The only judgments we can trust are made by those who care enough about us to know who we really are.  And even then, those judgments are rarely as important as the ones we make about ourselves.  If you're happy with who you are, what's the point of worrying about whether the woman behind you in line thought the shirt you were wearing was just a bit too tight?

The other half is this: if you're tired of people judging you based on some superficial observation, help make the world a friendlier place by refraining from doing it to others.  Ultimately, any sense of self-satisfaction gained by comparing ourselves to others is shallow and short-lived anyway.

There's my two cents.  Or, more accurately given the length of this post, my two dollars.  Feel free to let me know if you agree or disagree with any point that I made.  I'm always open to dialogue.  That's half the fun!