The Paradox of Being Nice

Nice, What is Nice?

Is being around people thinking YOU should be the perfect person & act like a perfect person?

or 

Is it you thinking YOU should be the best person for everyone?

or

Completely avoiding you needs & wants, to put others wants first?

Definitely not!

Lines that hit deep from this video :

"You've never felt like you could be yourself around me?" she said with a confused and mildly frustrated tone. Her face was both clenched with irritation and drooping with sorrow. Her brow pulled in while her mouth and cheeks fell out and down as she looked over at me lying stiffly in the hospice bed. She looked like she was about to cry, but she hadn't given in yet.

"I've felt like a version," I answered.

"What does that mean? A version?" Her tone was even tenser now.

"Just not my whole self, I guess. Not who I really am, whatever that means at this point."

"Then why the hell did you marry me?!" she said.

Between the stir-craziness of the last nearly two years, the medications, having been in the hospice center for the last three weeks, and of course, the looming finality of everything, I had, for the first time in as long as I could remember, perhaps in my entire life, suddenly felt the walls come down. I couldn't hold them anymore. More so, I just didn't care to.

It's not that I lost care altogether—I still cared a lot. It's just that I stopped caring about the things that didn't matter—at least not to me, not anymore. I didn't care about being perceived in a certain way. I didn't care being consistent. I didn't care about how well I played along, what other people expected and wanted of me.

My doctor had said that my chances of making it past one year after my diagnosis were very low given the state of my condition. Now, over a year and a half later, I felt like I was basically living free, extra days. In a way, my life felt like it had ended on that one-year mark. I felt like I was a ghost who only haunted himself. I saw myself almost as a carcass, of life, of regrets, yet still filled with the spirit of who I really was, who I had always wanted to be. I felt separate from everything, yet still present. It was one of those strange states that's impossible to translate to anyone who's never been in it—never outlived their own death.

I looked at Kate. "I've never felt like myself with anyone," I told her. "I didn't mean you, specifically. You didn't do anything. No one did. It was my fault."

"What do you mean, John?" she said, her tone loosening and opening up a bit.

"I blew it. I did so much wrong."

Kate leaned in closer toward me, shifting her hand a bit inside mine. I looked up at the ceiling.

"What are you talking about? Everyone loves you, John. Everyone I've ever known that knows you, that's spent time with you, loved you. Loves you."

I looked back over at her. Her face was softer now, stretching vertically rather than scrunching horizontally. She realized this wasn't about her or us.

"My whole life, I was so worried about whether or not people liked me. Loved me. I did everything I could to ensure that everyone did, that everyone thought I was the greatest. 'Oh, John is so great! He's this and he's that.' I changed so much about myself to make sure that happened. In moments, in phases, in years. I always went this way instead of that way to ensure that I did what people wanted, that people approved of and liked me. I cared so much about how I was experienced in the minds of everyone else that I never even really experienced me in my own."

There was a long pause.

"John, that just makes you a good person. You put others first. It's in your nature. It's a good thing." Her voice was shaky.

"Is it? Did I?"

There was another pause.

My head was hurting. I felt weak, and tired, and slightly numb. I felt a strange lucidity amidst the disorientation, though. Kate just sat there waiting.

"I cared about how people saw me," I continued. "I cared about how they experienced me. It was all always about me. Not anybody else."

"Well, who the hell else is it going to be about?" Kate interrupted. "Of course everything you do from your perspective is going to involve you."

"No. I didn't even really care about me either. That's the worst part. It was like a strange paradox of narcissism and self-abandonment. I was so desperate, so misguided, so self-focused on being liked and seen a certain way, I changed and reduced who I was at every turn. To appease my father, mother, friends, teachers, girlfriends, bosses, strangers... my wife. That's not a good person. It's not a bad person. It's just not much of a person at all."

Kate's eyes began to water. Then, so did mine.

"Honey," she said to me, "you did what you could. You did what you knew how. That's all anyone can do."

I paused for another moment. I looked out the room's window at the cars and people rushing by on the streets below. A city of people frantically completing to-do lists that weren't their own.

"I was so worried about being seen as a perfect person, someone who was successful, who was happy, who was always fun to be around, who was smart and competent, who did the right things in the right way, and now, I'm going to die without having really been seen by anyone at all."

I could hear Kate sniffing. I looked back over at her. She was pulling tears back in. They looked heavy.

"Okay," she said defiantly while rubbing her face. "Then talk to me now," she continued. "Let me see you. Be who you really are. There's still time. Use it."

- Video by Pursuit of Wonder