People Are First People

It’s easy to go through life feeling entitled. This is majorly because you feel other feel for you the way you feel for yourself. And that’s not really a terrible thing. It’s almost the default thing to do in fact; to think people would treat you the way that you would treat yourself.

But the truth is that you’ll be rudely shocked to experience quite the opposite; and it is more depressing when you realize that you’re not even entitled to feel bad about people’s behavior towards you.

There are great quotes and nice-sounding speeches which have been delivered to refute this position. Sayings like; ‘If you want to be treated like a queen, simply behave like one’ OR ‘If someone treats you like thrash, move the hell along’. Now, it would be very savage for me to say these sayings are not true (because they are somewhat true), but there’s either a ting of extreme entitlement or extreme responsibility  in them that I’m trying to argue against.

The truth is that selfish people, wicked people, bad people, aggressive people, adamant people, bossy people, boring people, impatient people, harsh people, rude people, dishonest people, secretive people, sarcastic people, overcritical people, inconsiderate people, insensitive people… are first, people.

You should never make it your sole responsibility to make people behave towards you in a certain way because if you do, you’ll help someone help you make you commit suicide. Neither should you ever relax and believe that you are owed certain reactions because you have ‘comported  yourself as a queen or king’, because you’ll help yourself make someone help you realize that you’re not owed anything from anyone.

It sounds like a rather sadist point of view but sadly, it’s the truth. All the people who hurt us hurt us only because we don’t realize that no one owes us anything really. And so someone who is being selfish towards us is first a human being with his or her own flaws before he is a person who is to think about you.

The flip side of my argument is that you, as a person, should never have to make others beg you to be good to them; neither should you (for whatever weird reason) think that you’re entitled to be unkind to people. Change the world from your end of the rope and we may yet pull this ship safe to harbor.

Hence, if you want someone to behave towards you in a certain way, find good people and walk with them. If they don’t behave towards you in the way that you have dreamed, understand that they’re humans, talk to them about how their behavior affects you and if they don’t see anything wrong with it, ask yourself if you can continue to be genuine with them despite how they make you feel. Yes? Continue your life. No? Continue your life.

Either way, you must realize that bad people are first people before they are bad. Don’t let the adjectives that define people define the verb that is your life.