Bryn Donovan - A New Blog I'm Reading

I am reading a blogger/writer, Bryn Donovan - "tell your stories, love your life."  I hope you will check her out, maybe even especially if you need some motivation to get busy and write.

Her latest blog was about how she confronted someone who was being offensive with a racist comment.  To confront is the courageous thing, the right thing, to do in order to be true to one's own values. To not confront that kind of rudeness, especially when the comment is so blatantly racist or misogynistic is cowardly, but for sure I've walked away from horrible comments from people who were being a jerk. Keeping the peace, I tell myself.

But then I realized, I can be a jerk, too.  And this is what I told Bryn:

Thank you for your candid reveal.  Your piece spoke to me, for sure, because I try really hard to be aware of when I'm caring too much what other people think and working hard to make sure they think the best of me.  One of my incidents happened when I hosted a book club/luncheon meeting at my house.  We had only met once before, so none of these ladies were friends yet, which probably made it worse - a friend would have told me to not try so hard.  But I did try - I made everything from scratch and worried that it would be great, and when I put it out for the five or six of them to come fill their plates, I said, "It's all homemade, you can be sure of that!"   No one commented on my stupid statement, and I realized in the silence that in fact we had met, as I said, at one other person's home and she had served quiches - two of them, and I'm sure they were supermarket quiches, and honestly very good.  I was being a jerk.  Who cares whether you make everything "homemade?"  How did that make the other hostess of book club feel?  When I think about it, I still feel ashamed of myself.  No matter how many times I have defended someone (President Obama comes to mind - the jokes that I heard about him made me seethe, and all I could say is that I didn't appreciate them, thank you) or  defended a race or an ethnicity or sexual orientation, I lost a point on this one. Sometimes being a jerk is just an off-hand comment you wish you hadn't said in your rush to impress or be accepted and liked.  It could mean we haven't let go of basing too much of our self-confidence upon what we imagine others think of us. I hope your locker room person really is  "working on herself," and I commend you for your part in her growth.

If anyone is reading this and you were either the jerk or in the company of the jerk who was being offensive, why don't you tell me how you handled the situation and how you feel about how you handled it.  It may not be an everyday event, but it happens, and usually we feel unprepared to know what to say.  Or, if you were the perpetrator, did you catch yourself?  Did you grow from what you did?