Friday, December 1, 2017

Making People Seem Better Than They Are

In this current season of Chicago Fire there's a new recurring character by the name of Hope. Her friend Sylvie Brett, who already works for the fire station, helped her to get the job as an assistant at the station.

Sylvie speaks highly of Hope even after finding out that her friend supposedly stole $10,000 from her last employer. She doesn't want to believe her friend would do such a thing. Sylvie still wants to believe in her friend after one of the fire fighters paychecks turns up missing. At the end of that particular episode Sylvie confronts Hope, and then once she's gone Hope shreds the evidence that she had the paycheck all along. The final straw is when Hope forges someone else's signature to get a fire fighter moved to a political position. 

In her first several episodes on the show, Hope went from the nice friend to a conniving woman that had to go. However, this isn't really about her. This is about Sylvie's perception of her. Sylvie wanted to support her friend. She wanted to believe her friend couldn't be doing terrible things to make herself appear better than she really was, or anything to ruin others around her. She gave her friend the benefit of the doubt and even though this is a fiction show, Sylvie is a symbol of those of us who do it way too often in real life. 

I'm one of those people that have given others the benefit of the doubt and had the reality of bullshit people thrown in my face. For instance I recently unfriended several people that landed in my vision because of Facebook groups. One of those people requested me after getting kicked out of a group and starting his own. He needed members. I don't know why he picked me to be one of those members if he didn't even like me, or why he wanted a Facebook group full of people he doesn't even value. I gave him the benefit of the doubt by joining his group, and even showing up to one of his events, but obviously I was being gullible. 

Actually there's a huge trend going on online where people connect themselves to others they have no actual respect for. One of my goals for the future is to learn how to spot them better and get them out of my vision, but for now I recognize I have a problem. 

I know I've talked about online drama a lot, but that's where the drama tends to happen. I used to have the drama in real life, but I learned to protect myself from the real life frenemies. Now I just have to get better at protecting myself from the online crazies. 

Although I have my issues with being too nice, it really hurt me when one of my Facebook friends shared a story recently about what she is currently going through. Well, she's been talking about her issue for some time now. I hope she's okay with me telling her story. She's an author that I look up to a lot. She's also a very nice lady that is fighting for social security disability coverage. 

Well, in recent times she's had trouble with the judge over her case, her lawyer, and making sure all her paperwork was getting done. 

One of the ways she has shown how overly nice is, is by doing the paperwork when her lawyer wasn't taking care of it. In a status she actually mentioned how the lawyer had just had a new baby, so she understood her needed time to bond with his family. Unfortunately in what I call a jackass move, after that the lawyer decided that he could no longer work with her. 

While it bothered her, and would bother anyone, she tried to positively move forward. However, hours before deciding to write this, she put up a new status. In her new status she said the lawyer filed papers to get her case dismissed. This was all after she had been doing the work toward the case herself and saying positive things about him to make herself feel better about her extra work. 

There's nothing we can really do to stop people from being assholes. However, we can stop giving them the benefit of the doubt; stop convincing ourselves that they are actually nicer than they really are. 

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Lashuntrice

Lashuntrice