Meany

There’s a person I have regular contact with, and I’ve always associated her with me ending up in a fiery hell. Even today, all morning and most of the afternoon everytime I thought about my feelings towards this person it would invariably end with “I’m so going to hell”.

This person is physically handicapped but mentally fine. I only see her a few days a week but it’s enough to rub my nerves raw and most days if I don’t avoid her I try to ignore her. I know it’s completely rude but it’s the only way I can deal with the situation without being labelled discriminatory or politically incorrect. As much as I bathe in the freedom of being unPC, we know that there are always limits as to how much you can express freedom of speech, thought and anything else out there. I know that. So do you. And when you read about what I think of this person you may still think that I have a thing against special needs people. But I don’t. To me they’re still people, just sometimes visibly different in some way.

So this lady bothers me because it is my belief that she plays up her handicap. She frequently shifts from happy to depressed in the span of minutes according to the level of attention meted out to her. She has a habit of calling, seeing and phoning people up several times a day, dismissing the fact that most of us are bogged down with work and busy, to ask them if she could ask them a question, then profusely apologizing for being rude followed by begging to please keep it between us. You could spend 10 minutes with her trying to figure out what exactly it is she wants and come out of it having gotten nowhere. She needs the attention to feed itself because there really isn’t anything she wanted in the first place other than the person’s sympathy. Almost 5 years I've known her and we've never once had a conversation that went anywhere.

She will stand at the doorways of offices, sigh deeply and wait patiently until someone looks up to ask her what’s wrong. Then she will sigh some more, wave her hand at you and pitifully tell you that she doesn’t want to talk, or that it’s nothing, or that she’s very upset before wandering away to find someone else who might be more comforting. I see her as a person who does nothing but waste my time by using her handicap as a crutch to garner charity and so I try not to engage in her little game by ignoring her whenever possible.

But then a lightbulb went off and now I feel justification in my distaste for her. Sure I’m still going to hell but that’s for a multitude of reasons, not for any one specific thing. I shouldn’t feel guilty for not liking this person because it’s not her difference that bothers me, it’s her personality. OK, there’s still a little bit of leftover guilt because for some reason there's an arcane rule that if you feel an iota of negativity towards a person of special needs, that’s just extra wrong because you must be looking down on them. But on the whole, I couldn’t care less about her disability. I now realize that I saw past it eons ago and what we’ve got left is just a clash of personalities. And you could say that perhaps her attitude stems from her lifelong handicap and therefore, indirectly I’m still a horrid person but I believe that somewhere, we need to draw that line in the sand and make a decision. I won’t wallow back and forth any longer about my guilt, her bothersome nature and the way I should treat her. I have the right to feel the way I do and be civil to her when she’s up while walking away when she makes a show of being down.

She is the boy who cried wolf and I’m finally able to see that. I won't be damned because I'm unwilling to play the game.