The nastiness of niceness

"If people are really nice and happy all the time, you wanna look out for the darkness in them. But the ones that are dark all the time, you want to put a lightness in the middle of them, cause they're probably pretty nice people."

Tom Hardy

15 years ago I was working as a workshop laborer for a small kitchen cabinet manufacturer. Most of the guys I worked with were rough and ready blue collar types who were as real as rain in your face. But there was this one guy who didn't fit in. He came from a "nice" family and was slumming for a summer. I was the only "christian" in the workshop and as I'd only embraced Christianity three years previously I was still working hard at learning to be "nice and kind" to everyone around me. Now this 20 something nice guy spent the first part of the summer busting my butt with sly innuendos about people who believe in fairy tales, and that people like that were really just weaklings because they needed a crutch to lean on. He never came out and said it to my face, it was always couched in slyness. What I call "niceness" which means that it was always something deniable.

I put up with this for weeks with gritted teeth, trying mightily to turn the other cheek and be a "nice" Christian. The other laborers watched on with interest, silently wondering how long it would take before I blew a fuse. Finally one hot summer morning he said something insulting that was obviously about me and I snapped, unleashed the "real" me, grabbed him by the throat, lifted him off the ground, propelled him across the workshop and slammed him into a granite wall. With him hanging a foot off the ground trying to breath through a windpipe that was being badly crushed I explained the new rules of life to him: "if I ever thought that he was even "thinking" a rude thought that was directed towards me, I promised to ensure that that thought would leave him bleeding badly in a corner. I then explained that afterwards I would talk to my "fairy-tale" God and ask Him for forgiveness for being violent to such a nice person."

He took the message to heart, found the inner strength to stop being "nice" and start being very real around me. That meant he rarely spoke to me because he really didn't like me, but he also stopped looking at me like I was something nasty he had just stepped in.

After that little drama the other guys in the workshop made fun of me mercilessly about the incident. They never even thought to be "nice." It was full throated ridicule because I'd snapped and stopped being this "nice christian" they had never believed existed. In many ways that incident broke the ice between me and everyone else except the "nice" guy. They knew my attempts to be "nice" were nothing more than makeup hiding the real me and were relieved to finally see me stop hiding and start being normal. I ended up talking about my idea of who god was and listening to their differing ideas about god and eventually some of them became my friends.

In my last post I said that I wasn't "nice" or "kind" and a guy responded because he thought I had boasted that I was mean and vicious. He was incensed that I was deriding being nice and kind.

It makes me sad that after 18 years in Christianity a lot of people I meet are trying mightily to be nice and kind when what they really want to do is propel someone across a room.

After my experience of propelling an obnoxious man across a room I began to explore the different ways that I could be an authentic human being while still being an authentic Christian.  Now after years of working hard at avoiding being a "nice and kind" Christian, I have found a small, narrow place of self-acceptance and self-expression that accurately expresses the fact that I'm not a very comfortable person to be around, but that I have some very admirable qualities and that my real friends love and trust me deeply and everyone else keeps their distance until they are sure that their nice actions won't provoke me to action.

I also gained the capacity to use words instead of muscle to respond to the "nice" people I occasionally meet who are delighted to snipe at other people as long they can retain the ability of deniability. I now can produce the same results with a well turned phrase as I did with brute force 15 years ago. And before you feel that I have stepped into the world of civility and genteel living please understand that words really can destroy and dismay just as much as a slowly constricting windpipe.

I choose to risk harming them because nice people tend to be the nastiest people I meet. I had this Christian lady tell me once that: "if one didn't have anything kind to say, one should not say anything." I always thought this was such an odd philosophy. For if I only say kind things to people then when I shut up everyone should know my silence is meant to be incredibly deafening in its silent unkind condemnation!

I'm neither mean nor vicious, but neither am I dishonestly nice and kind. I try hard to say and do exactly what I mean. This may sound incredibly arrogant to some who reads this, but it has the nobility of at least being honest and I find it generates among those who know me best a sense of trustworthiness that what you see in me is what you get from me.

It refreshes me when I meet honest people, even the ones who don't like me but have the integrity to say so. It depresses me when I meet people who find me unsavory but lack the courage and integrity to say so.

I'm neither nice nor kind. If I feel I should say out loud what I think, then I will try to do so no matter how uncomfortable it makes the room I'm in. That tends to make me an uncomfortable person to be around. But better to be thought uncomfortable than be nasty.

A long winding post about me.... if I'm not worth the reading of it, then I'm probably not worth reading.

Hope you are all real and not nice.... :)