Lost Respect

You teach people how they should treat you. Teach them to treat you with respect and they treat you with respect. Teach them to disrespect you and they walk all over you. It isn't a one-time thing, but a continued habit.

It takes me a while to realize this, but there are some people to which I have debased myself. There was one occasion a while back when I was walking in D.C. with someone when their phone rang. The person answered it without even an "Excuse me" and just kept on talking for the next five or ten minutes while we kept on walking. I didn't call them out on it. Instead, I proceeded to treat them like shit, mocking them mercilessly for the rest of the night.

The problem was that I let myself be walked all over previously, and that led to the current state of affairs. I now know that this person has no respect for me, and sadly, it goes both ways at this point. To be (un)fair, my current viewpoint was more reactionary to them than an independent assessment. Still, that is how it stands now. It's too late to change their mindset, and so I question whether it's even worth it to keep interacting with this person. Theoretically, I am deserving of respect, but to this particular person, I am not. Why should I continue smiling and laughing and playing the fool when they're laughing at me, and not with me?

Another person, I now have trouble talking to. The relationship we established in the past involved me swallowing my pride and grinning at their comments directed towards me, sometimes throwing back similar. I wasn't entirely comfortable with it, but decided it would be easier to just keep my mouth shut.

That person has stayed the same, making the same comments, but I've changed. I'm no longer so willing to accept it, and have made this known, but to no avail. They continue to make the comments. Again, there's no respect there, and I question why I even try to deal with it. It's a fight that I'm no longer willing to raise arms for. Some people lower their shoulders right before a collision. Here, I've lowered my expectations and decided to just give up.

It hurts, because at one point, I liked both of them. I tried to be their friend, but more and more, it seems like a one-sided friendship. Maybe a loving slave type of relationship. It's frustrating. It's a waste of their time, because they could just as easily get a dog, and it's a waste of my time, because I could go hang out with peers, not superiors.

On the flip side, I was joke-lamenting how no one respected me one day. The other person just looked at me and said "I don't know why you keep saying no one respects you." Didn't believe it then, but I do realize that there are people that respect me. For whatever reason, I have taught them to treat me as a fellow human being, and it turns out that they still do. For this I am thankful. Though it is a small thing, these interactions with others, it is strangely reassuring and reaffirming to me, this respect.

I haven't watched too much Scarface. It's not like I'm all of a sudden going to demand you respect me. There's no point to that. Just going to try to teach people from here on out to respect me. If that's not possible for them, for whatever reason, they can keep on going on their path, and leave me to mine. I already have low-enough self-esteem, and don't need them pushing it even lower.

On the brighter side, all this has taught me to, in the future, demand more from others. Set the baseline to be treatment as an equal, and at least if it is impossible to start from there, I can stop wasting effort, energy and emotion on these people.