misery's a river, children. everybody row.

[the_siobhan]

I was talking to bcholmes today about an incident that happened once and that has had me completely mystified ever since. It's been close to two decades, but something about that "poem" I wrote just knocked it loose to rattle around in my head.

I had a friend - lets call her Sue for the purpose of this blog. Note that she bears no relationship whatsoever with any actual Sue either living or dead. Sue and I used to hang around a lot - we were both single, heavy drinkers and had jobs with sufficient income that we could support all of our bad habits. That's usually a killer combination for me. Anyway most weekends we were out causing some form of mayhem together.

At the same time, I had another friend. Let's call him Bill. Also bearing no relation to any actual Bill living or dead. Sue and I both knew Bill, and thought he was a good guy and enjoyed his company. We didn't really "hang out" per se, but we liked the same bands, drank at the same watering holes, occasionally ended up at the same parties. That kind of thing.

So Bill lived under the poverty line, and it came to pass that he needed to get out of his apartment. And he sent a general message out to his friends asking if anybody could lend him some cash to put towards first and last. Not asking for pity or saying poor me, just "if you could do this it would really help me out".

I didn't know him that well at the time, but it wasn't a huge amount of money that he needed, and I was doing pretty good financially back then. So I offered. So he showed up at my apartment, wrote out a little contract - to my somewhat impressed bemusement - we both signed it and I gave him a cheque. And once a month for the next two years an envelope would appear in my mailbox with a cheque in it, taking another small slice off of the debt. Once - maybe twice - he phoned and said it was a particularly tight month and he couldn't do it, was that ok? And I said yes and the following month another cheque would appear right on schedule.

I never really thought that much more about it. More importantly to the point of this story, I never told anybody about it. Mostly because it was a deal between me and him and it never really occured to me to mention it to anybody at the time. I have no idea if he told anybody or not. But, the fact that he had sent out a call asking people for help was public knowledge, along with the fact that he moved the following month.

So it happened that one night I was sitting around at Sue's place with a handfull of people all sitting around and drinking. And for whatever reason Bill's name came up. And Sue started talking about how she didn't really like him that much, talking about him dismissively in way that indicated that she thought his character was in some way flawed. And then the kicker came. She looked me right in the eye and said, "You know when he moved last year he borrowed a whole bunch of money from people and never paid them back."

In retrospect I probably should have said spoken up given that there were other people there. I did later take a couple of them aside and tell them privately that Sue was full of shit. And in my defense, I haven't noticed that Bill's reputation suffered much as a result.

But what really went on my head at that exact moment is that a little filing drawer marked "Will Make Shit Up About You And Tell Those Lies To Other People When You Are Not Around" opened in my head, Sue dropped neatly into it, and the drawer closed. From that moment on I didn't believe a single word that came out of her mouth. I didn't make a big deal about it, but there were times that it was pretty obvious that I was treating her as an unreliable witness and if anybody asked me why, I told them the truth. And I was supremely unshocked when she finally turned her nasty habit on me and we just stopped interacting altogether.

You know I've never told Bill this story. Maybe I should - I still hang out with him sometimes.

Sue, on the other hand, I haven't seen in well over ten years. She left town at some point, angry and hurt that over the years all her "so-called friends" had abandoned her and I don't know what happened to her afterwards. I hope she managed to get her shit sorted out because I think she was a pretty unhappy person.

But to this day I can not figure out what the entire purpose of that little incident was. Why the fuck would anybody do something that... pointless. It's not even about the lie itself, I just don't get why she would do that when there was absolutely zero profit in it for her. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

You know, some days I wonder if maybe I'd stop getting headaches if I stopped insisting that people make sense.

Comments

[mr-sharkey.livejournal.com]

I'm going to be pedantic and fall back on Maslow again - sounds like she had a need for power and was pursuing that need destructively. They only other explanation I can think of for similar events in my life is mental illness of some sort or other - you know, the kind involving voices.

But you raise another interesting question - who do you tell about what? If you have reason to think someone else is a shit, do you keep it to yourself and watch people get hurt, or do you risk being labelled a prick yourself opening your mouth? Everyone else - don't read too much into the timeliness of this question. I've asked it of myself many times over many many years.



M.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

How do you perceive that kind of thing as gaining power?

Most people know if I think somebody is a shit. If said person is a friend of theirs, I tend not to harp on about it because I don't really see a point. (If they actually are a shit, as opposed to me just not liking them. I can find somebody's personality unpleasant to be around without necessarily thinking that they are an asshole.)

In the case of Sue and Bill, I pulled people aside and told them that despite what Sue had said, I was the person who had loaned Bill the money and he paid me every month religiously and let them draw their own conclusions about it. If they were surprised when she later talked shit about them, well, Yet Another Learning Experience.

[panic-girl.livejournal.com]

How do you perceive that kind of thing as gaining power?

For interest, was Sue a very popular person, or someone who usually sat on the periphery of a group?

From my experience, the person with the "best" gossip is going to get a lot of attention, whether or not it's true. Attention is power, at least to the person seeking it.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Sue was very outgoing - she was likely to focus a lot of the attention at a party on herself because of that.

She didn't have a huge number of friends, but she was no wallflower.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

*Ting*

Aha. So about a long time ago, I shared a house with a 'Sue'. I'm not aware that she had (m)any old friends, just an awful lot of people who she'd fallen out with because they'd done something terrible to her.

Life and soul of the party, mind. And God help you if you told better stories than she did.

Eventually I became one of those people when she failed in ripping me off for 2k5.

[strang-er.livejournal.com]

I've caught myself, and been caught out too, talking crap about other people in the past - not making stuff up, so much as expressing opinions on things i don't know enough to have an opinion on - just to have something to talk about and sound like i'm 'in the know'. I put it down as an insecurity thing (at least it was for me at the time) and can well imagine the temptation to add a bit of malicious gossip in to the mix for extra schadenfreude value.

I've also known people who were big on the "putting down everyone you felt was below you in status, sucking up to everyone above you in status, undermining the status of people close to your own level" thing mentioned by someone below, in a social rather than career sense.

[panic-girl.livejournal.com]

Ahhh schadenfreude.
You're on to something there.
All the people in Sio's posts, saying "ooooh where's the drama at?" are a good example of it too.
I've been there; hung out on LJDrama for a while.

[panic-girl.livejournal.com]

If you have reason to think someone else is a shit, do you keep it to yourself and watch people get hurt, or do you risk being labelled a prick yourself opening your mouth?
My honest opinion? You keep your mouth shut, let people choose their own friends, and if it bites them in the ass, remain their friend and support them in any hurt, without ever being smug.

I'm not sure if I ever told you (anyone who can read this) about Emily, a person I knew from Calgary, who came here later. Girl was pathological. Anyone who's come in contact with her knows that. When I started hanging out with her a couple people "warned" me and I said "thank you very much but she's good to me, I don't see her hurting anyone else, and we have fun." We were friends for years before I really understood the extent of her crazy; a crazy I haven't seen a rival for since. I wasn't mad a the people who warned me, but I was a bit annoyed at the time. Yeah, you know, I looked like a fool when I defended her to people who knew better. But those people didn't think less of me later, and I appreciated it.

[kest]

I try to take the stand of providing people with information that I think is important, but leaving them alone to form their own opinions. Sometimes, just because I've had a bad experience with someone doesn't mean they're a bad person. Other times it means there's a destructive pattern going on.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I'm a big believer that all people tend to follow patterns and that I can do a lot to smooth my own interactions with them if I am aware of those patterns. Every human being on the planet has flaws - if I know which ones person X has, and whether or not I can tolerate or avoid them, then I know whether or not X and I can be friends.

Not that people can't reinvent themselves - I've seen it. Hell, I've done it. But it's work and it takes time, and if it's over little stuff most people aren't willing to make the investment.

And also not to say that I don't get tripped up. I have let myself ignore Big Glowing Fucking Warning Signs in the past, but man do I get taught a life lesson when I do.

[kest]

I think what I was trying to say here is, sometimes I have a bad interaction with a person, and its just me. Or it was a misunderstanding. Or they'd been going through a hard time. Or I'd been biased by other people's opinions. Or we just don't have good chemistry. Even if I've decided, for whatever reason, that I can't handle them, I'd hate to end up turning other people against them, even accidentally, just because I've formed a negative opinion. So all I can say is 'this is my experience.' It might be nothing. Or it might be something they should be aware of. It's up to them to figure that out.

[redbird]

There are people who like to spread bad news. Some of them make a point of finding out and spreading actual bad news, relevant or otherwise: if they can't tell you about a natural disaster or the death of a relative, they'll tell you that two people you've never heard of are getting divorced. (These are people who would never tell you that two people you never heard of are newly in love, nor "A and B are splitting up, but it's pretty friendly," even if it was friendly.)

And maybe Sue was that sort of person and couldn't find enough real bad news that people would listen to.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

hm. two things:

there is profit in cutting down other people who're well-liked; it can remove competition (or at least can make one imagine one is removing competition). or just make the person feel good for "cutting somebody down to size". ya know, the whole principle of raising oneself by stepping on others, which a fair number of insecure assholes adhere to.

another thing is of course that she might've just heard this from somebody else who was lying, took it at face value, and spread it. too many people gossip like this.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I thought of that, but I got the very strong impression (unverifiable, of course) that she made it up on the spot.

Certainly I never heard it from anybody else.

[mathochist.livejournal.com]

If she was feeling particularly bad about herself in that moment, then her motivations may have been
"I may be horrible, but at least I'm better than HIM"
and
"if I get everyone else to focus on how bad HE is, then no one will notice how bad I am."

[unagothae.livejournal.com]

Never attribute to malice what can easily be attributed to ignorance/laziness.

Obviously, it's malice when someone has a motive, like a coworker who tells your boss that you are abrasive and unpleasant to be around because your excellent work makes her look bad and she wants you gone.

Sue, was more likely expressing an ignorant opinion of the guy based on something she heard or something she assumed about him. She likely had no motive other than stating her own feelings. People do that alot.

It's very possible that her negative opinion of him was formed by some insignificant moment she doesn't even remember and she's gathered up all kinds of "evidence" to support that feeling. So, when her chance came to share that feeling, she grabbed the story that most people were likely to know about and dramatized the details to support her feeling. People are often willing to sacrifice the literal truth of their words to express an emotional truth that would otherwise get lost in the lost in the details. With a story like that, she wouldn't have to justify her negative feelings, people would simply understand.

The points about control are valid, but most people don't tend to see what they are doing in those terms. Most people believe they are honest and that they are simply telling the truth as best they know it.

Of course, there's also the possibility that she's a drama queen and gets off on twisting the truth of things for maximum dramatic effect. She was in the mood to see people react in a certain way, so she took a commonly known story and gave it an ending that would get the desired result.

My understanding of people like that is that they are just having fun without thinking about the consequences of their actions. They get a thrill out of seeing people's reactions and figure that the consequences are so minimal that no harm will come of it.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I always wondered if she hit on him and he turned her down and this was her revenge. We were both pretty promiscuous at that time, but I was a lot more prosaic about getting no for an answer.

[death4breakfast.livejournal.com]

You apparently think a lot better of people than I do. IMO, they don't really *care* if anything bad comes of it.

I think it's simply typical social behavior, where it pops into their head that Bob needs to be taken down a bit in social standing, and here's something to say that's negative. I don't think that most people even think about these things, they just do them.

I remember on night sitting at a restaurant and listening to someone talking at the table next to me. The woman (Who apparently worked there.) sat there for a good hour and a half, putting down everyone who she dealt with who she felt was below her in status, and talking up and sucking up to everyone who she knew who was above her in status, with a few subtle forays at undermining the status of people who were close to her own level.

This was *all* she did. It was vicious and disgusting, and it taught me quite a bit about people, and if I'd ruled the world I would most assuredly have had her shot.

Ultimately, humans are monkeys with cameras and guns. There should really be nothing surprising that some people are caught up in flinging poo at their rivals. It's disgusting, when you regard yourself as a more sophisticated variety of monkey, but unfortunately, that's what it all boils down to.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

You apparently think a lot better of people than I do. IMO, they don't really *care* if anything bad comes of it.

I wouldn't say that people don't care, but in my experience most people have a really hard time making the connection between actions and consequences.

[unagothae.livejournal.com]

That was pretty much my point :)

Ignorance/laziness is where people tend to fail to make the connection.

Malice is when people make the connection and do that shitty thing anyway.

[unagothae.livejournal.com]

I definitely have a tendency to assume people care when they clearly don't.

I am learning the flipside of my first statement: never attribute to ignorance/laziness what is clearly attributable to malice.

But I still think that people, on the whole are simply lazy/ignorant rather than malicious.

I do consider myself a more sophisticated variety of monkey, but I try to be careful where I fling my poo and to clean up any inadvertent messes I make in the process.

[siani-hedgehog.livejournal.com]

i expect he had some information about her that would make her look bad, and it was a pre-emptive strike.

i had a friend who regularly claimed that men had raped her in order to make sure that their stories about her frankly insane behaviour were considered less valid by her future targets. the first 2 or 3 times, it worked.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Ha! You'd have to know Bill. He's never said a bad thing about another person in his entire life.

[siani-hedgehog.livejournal.com]

same thing applied to more than one of the blokes this friend was concerned about. :) it wasn't that they *would* say anything, just that they *could*...

[shara.livejournal.com]

I worked with an individual who was a compulsive liar, to the point where she would say things that were verifyably untrue and everyone knew it. But it seemed to me that the lies had less to do with wanting to spread the content, and were more of a challenge to the rest of the group. She knew she was lying, you knew she was lying... but if you SAID anything about it, then you were the enemy. You were expected to roll over and take it.

Either that or she was batshit crazy, which is also possible.

Example:

One day she tripped down the stairs at work and banged her head on the stairwell. Much fuss was made by her and our boss about it. Insert drama here.

The next day she came in to work and claimed that the mark on her forehead was from having got into a fight on the street the night before. She gave us a tale about saving some poor girl from an abusive guy.

We all knew where the mark had come from - we not only saw her accident the day before, but she made a huge goddamn deal about it. But now we are to pretend it was something else?

I don't get people. I was ultimately fired (or quit) because I refused to live in this person's alternate reality... but nobody else seemed to have a problem with it. What's stranger to me than these fucktards is the social reality that lets them get ahead.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I vote for the crazy.

I suspect (and this is ONLY a theory, since I didn't witness any of it) that you may have been fired because you were going against the unspoken group consensus on This Is How We Are Going To Deal With The Crazy Bitch. People will build elaborate social norms to avoid direct conflict[1] and you may have been bucking those norms.

[1]To avoid conflict in real life, that is. Online interaction is different.

[death4breakfast.livejournal.com]

"I fell down the stairs at work and hit my head," is also something that work can sue for, "I got into a fight lsat night," is not.

Just a thought.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Very good point. I hadn't thought of that.

[caspervonb.livejournal.com]

You know what I find interesting more than
anything else?

Peoples' takes on stories like this say so
much more than just the obvious about their
world views.

The perspective, angle or motivation they
perceive in the actions of "Sue" shows a hell
of a lot, I think.

I'm not saying this as any sort of value
judgement. Far from it. It's just that I've
always been fascinated by what goes on in
peoples' heads. Why they do what they do.
I find it so genuinely interesting.

This is like Christmas come early for me. ;)

For the record though, I've seen behaviour like
Sue's many times before. It generally comes
hand in hand with some pretty hefty insecurities.

I've noticed that it's pretty common for insecurities
to come out as attacks on those perceived to be
in a weaker position. Like trying to look better
by comparison (and, by extension, feel better about
yourself too).

I always find it hard to explain things that I
understand on a more empathic than logical level
but I think it's because it's easier to look
like a better person by making everyone else
look crap than it is to actually make the effort
to be a better person.

And when you think little of yourself to begin
with, trying to become a better person is not
necessarily an option. Which leaves you with
bringing others down as the one way to feel
better about yourself.

Children do it very frequently, albeit on a
different scale and with a lot less subtlety.

I'm not sure if I'm getting my idea across
very well but I'm really tired.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

This is like Christmas come early for me. ;)

Ha! Never say I never gave you anything.

Interesting perspective. It does make me wonder what it say about me that my reaction to something like that is to think, "How is this action useful to her?"

I guess I'm pretty utilitarian about these things.

[caspervonb.livejournal.com]

"Ha! Never say I never gave you anything."

:p

"Interesting perspective. It does make me
wonder what it say about me that my reaction
to something like that is to think, "How
is this action useful to her?"

I guess I'm pretty utilitarian about these
things."

I thought you had already realized this but
you approach most things from a survivor's
mindset. (I don't mean it as a politically
charged term.)

That's generally a pretty utilitarian/
practical point of view.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Point.

[http://users.livejournal.com/cincinnatus_c_/]

This reminds me, uncomfortably, of the most embarrassing thing I've done this year.

I was sitting around with a bunch of people and told a couple of them that someone not present had committed some very minor and more or less accidental kind of infraction against one of the other people present and someone else.

As soon as I finished saying this, I realized that actually the person who had committed the infraction was the other person present, and the person I'd said had done it was actually one of the victims.

I don't know if the person who had actually done it heard me tell this story. I quietly but insistently told the couple of people I'd been telling it to that I'd gotten it completely wrong and to please please forget it--and then felt awful the rest of the time I was there because I was afraid I'd embarrassed the guy who actually did it (because, like I say, what he'd done was more or less an accident), and because the fact that I'd told this story at all, never mind the fact that I'd gotten it wrong, showed up something pretty disturbing to me about myself. (Though it wouldn't have been shown up to me if I hadn't gotten it wrong, and realized I'd gotten it wrong, which made it all the more disturbing.) I chalked it up to being, uh, Socially Developmentally Delayed--I am, actually, hardly ever sitting around talking with groups of people--and hope(d) like hell it would teach me not to do that kind of thing again.

Anyway. That's me, and it makes me wonder whether, maybe, when people tell false stories, it's because they've gotten some wires crossed and think they know something they actually don't. It's easy, at least for some people (like me!), to mix and match stories without realizing you've done it. (Not that this has anything to do with what Sue was doing, but I can, at least, imagine someone telling a story like that where I was Sue.)

I do also know at least one habitual (compulsive, you might say) liar. Power, yeah, I do think that's a large part of what it's about (certainly that's a large part of what my telling my false story was about)--it's, I think, something people might resort to when they feel otherwise powerless. (And people who feel powerless are often very dangerous, because they don't appreciate the power they actually do exercise--they think their actions have no effects, so they can, e.g., lie, and it doesn't make any difference.)

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I think those are what we call Learning Experiences.

I've figured out most of what I think of as my morals and standards by doing it wrong at least once and figuring out that I really didn't want to do it ever again.

[missjanette.livejournal.com]

See, I always want to assume it's crossed wires, that somehow some information got misunderstood and the bullshit is what came out.

However, I've seen too many times that bullshit becomes a bunch of maliciousness. It may have started out as a misunderstanding that got twisted into ugliness or it may have always been merely ugliness. It's hard to thing your friends are capable of manufacturing ugliness out of the clear blue sky.

Why do ppl do this? I have no idea. If it's to gain status, it frequently backfires.

[the-fury.livejournal.com]

This was surprisingly difficult to put into any semblance of order, but here goes:

I'm pretty much in agreement with missjanette on this, and I almost always assume that wires got crossed somewhere along the way. I have a tendency to believe the best of people and their motives, and I generally give the benefit of the doubt. I obviously get it wrong with some people, but in the majority of cases I think I'm on track.

This being said, it happens. And anytime I've seen behaviour like this it's been part of a status play. It can a way to knock someone you don't like down (or even completely out) or it can be a way to raise yourself up in relation to everyone else.

As I see it, status is really a relative term. It's a given that there are no absolute status measurements that state "From this mark and up, you're an Alpha. Congratulations." This means you can easily gain relative status by knocking people down. Hell, it can be much easier and faster than becoming a better person yourself. Well, until you get caught at it, that is.

And there can be a number of conscious and subconscious reasons for it as well. Some perceived hurt that can't go unaddressed. Trying to make yourself feel better by being more important to the group. Attempting to get more power by moving up in the group. Getting rid of the competition.

Thing is, we've all grown up with these group dynamics. We've grown up with terms like "knock'em down a peg" and we've seen politicians spewing crap about pretty much everything. It's so ingrained that there are points where you might not even realise when you're doing it yourself. And that's really the part that bothers me.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Like I said, I can't prove it, but I had the strong impression that she made it up on the spot.

When I think about it, also wasn't the first time I caught her lying - I remember her once repeating a story I told her as if it happened to her - and then turning to me and saying, "Remember when that happened?" I also remember her telling stories about things we had supposedly done together that had just never happened.

Maybe she was just fucking crazy.

[strang-er.livejournal.com]

I've known a couple of people who tell lies so easily and automatically that they even believe them themseves.

[eciklb.livejournal.com]

I think the fact that it wasn't the first time is pretty important. We all get stories mixed up occasionally, and when I hear someone say something I know to be untrue once I try not to put too much stock in it, but when it's a pattern, that's different.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

It's so ingrained that there are points where you might not even realise when you're doing it yourself. And that's really the part that bothers me.

Big Fucking Ditto.

[meetzemonsta.livejournal.com]

You know, some days I wonder if maybe I'd stop getting headaches if I stopped insisting that people make sense.

I've wondered this myself, about a thousand million times. Problem is, the sense is never going to come. People rarely make any sense.

My best friend's ex-boyfriend is one of the lying liars. He once came back to a party I was having and told everyone that he was walking through the projects and saw a pack of skins jumping a lone black guy, so he waded in and commenced stabbing. I didn't call him out on it, because it was my best friend's guy and she was all googly-eyed over him, but I completely ignored him and his story.

On the other side of the coin is an ex-friend of mine. Very close friend. Delusional to the point of some serious scary, constantly pushes people out of her life due to perceived slights, cost me a lot of friendships that I'm still trying to patch up to this day, and caused me so much head/heartache in the time we were close that it makes me cringe when I think about it. Straight up batshit insane.

In some ways, I can kind of feel bad for the liars because they're so desperate for attention that it's really quite sad when they break into their song-and-dance numbers. And maybe if they had a good group of friends to keep their noses in line, the stories wouldn't happen.

But, the complete nutters? Those fucks need some kind of special coloration pattern so Nature can let the rest of us know "DO NOT APPROACH, IT WILL BE A BAD SCENE".