I think it’s Maya Angelou who said, “The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them.”
Well, there’s this guy who has shown who he really is to me hundreds of times, and yet I have always chosen to believe something better or different about him. When does that kind of behavior on my part go from being blindness to abject stupidity? When is knowing enough to keep some psychic distance not good enough?
Today.
When I experienced from him perhaps the most self-centered and hurtful behavior ever. (And that’s saying a lot.)
I wrote to a friend who was out of the country and told her what happened. I said, if I am speaking to him again when you return, please have me killed. Really. Please do. Because this is a lesson he has given me in many forms, over and over again. Learn it already, Mary Ann. People don’t really change who they are unless they see the need for change and take action. There are, indeed toxic people in the world who are blind to the damage they do to others. He is one. Toxic. Yes, suffering from childhood wounds like the rest of us, and yes, deserving of compassion, but toxic all the same, and besides deserving of compassion, deserving of great distance.