- OR HOW UTTERLY DISGUSTED I AM AT IMMATURE PEOPLE WHO BLAME OTHERS FOR THEIR LACK OF "SELF-CONTROL" WHEN THEY DON'T EVEN HAVE ENOUGH RESTRAINT TO LOOK AT THINGS FROM A DIFFERENT ANGLE BECAUSE THEY ARE SO EXCITED ABOUT HARMING SOMEONE!! DISGUSTING. UNCIVILIZED. TRASH.

I am SO mad. I like to think of myself as a balanced person; I try to look at things from different perspectives and be considerate and reasonable most of the time, but there are moments - usually in the face of plain ignorant, inconsiderate or shameless behaviour - when everything just collapses because I'm angered and saddened to the point of tears. It scares me when my emotions are out of control, when I'm shaking and my head feels hot and heavy.

A friend linked me to this GIF just now and praised the idea. Whether it's a joke or not, I cannot stand it when people retaliate like that, through words or actions. I don't like it when people harm others, and while I understand that there are many ill humans out there who go out of their way to inflict pain on others, I still do not approve of responding with hate; you can choose to walk away or to speak out against it and whether the conflict will end on a peaceful note depends on the parties involved - plain hate, however, will not lead to anything but more anger and more hurt. Sometimes you are very angry, lose control over yourself and add to that, I understand, and I'm fine with it if you apologize afterwards. But if you've had time to think about how to act and choose an option with the intention to hurt someone else? That I can't live with.

I told my friend that I don't approve of such behaviour and they just asked me whether I'd accept poor customer service. But is it really that hard to simply choose not to leave any tip and not to return? Does it take that much self-control to restrain yourself so as not to harm someone else just because you happened to get poor service at the respective place once, with nobody forcing you to come back or lie about the quality of the service? If it is indeed something grave, you could complain to the manager and they'll be able to take care of it internally.

See, it hurts me when people retaliate in situations where you can just walk away and choose not to get involved again. You don't always know what the inside of a person, especially a stranger, looks like, you don't necessarily know whether they truly meant to be rude or whether it was an accident, whether they're just having a bad day, whether they might be feeling sorry about it. There are too many people out there who presume to know exactly what's going on and who are too self-absorbed to see things from a different perspective. I understand that it might be their job to serve other people and that it's required of them to behave in a certain way and to smile, but nobody is ALWAYS in ABSOLUTE control of themselves. And yes, a single incident of not being able to control yourself may cost them their job, but that still doesn't make it YOUR task to punish them, and if you intentionally pull something similar to what's featured in that GIF, you're just a horrible person whose action is way out of proportion.

I don't understand my friend's arguments at all. So what if the manager might not be around? So what if you paid a lot for the meal? I don't think that minimal decency should be tied to those factors. I just feel so betrayed by friends when they act like this or approve of things like this, and in contrast to them, I don't think that it's each person's own business to choose how to react. It's not merely a matter of opinion with harmless results, and if that's the kind of human you choose to be, I don't want to be involved with you.

Besides, it hurts me on a personal level when people think like that. I am autistic, have social anxiety and an inferiority complex, and I was dealing with depression for the longest time during school; during that period, one of my biggest fears was that people would think of me as ungrateful because I did not or could not show any results in spite of all the support I was given - because I felt I owed them something, because that level of gratitude was not something I could express (spoken words felt cheap, wrong and fleeting to me). There are always so many words and thoughts in me that go unspoken because I constantly seem unable to communicate with the world (usually, the world does not communicate on my terms) and the thought that people out there would not just presume to know why someone acts the way they do, but even retaliate to what they think is happening absolutely terrifies me. I don't want to be friends with these people because even though they've given me good treatment, their thinking might just as well turn on me one day.

I am extremely tolerant when it comes to weaknesses in others because of the things I've gone through and the person I am now, and I will never cease to be grateful to those who were willing to make accommodations for me to get me to where I am now; I just wish more people were able to acknowledge that there are humans out there with struggles beyond your own experience.

The worst part about this particular issue is that it is so very difficult to talk about it with others. I wanted to tell some of my friends about the reason I'm so upset, but I can't because you never know which of them might actually agree with that kind of retaliation. I have friends who throw back insults when they've been wronged in a casual context, I have friends who have given me complaint letters addressed at customer service to proofread, letters which are visibly full of rage and impolite undertones; I can't bring myself to trust these friends with these topics even though they are close to me. It's horrible how there are demons in people around you and how you don't know whether someone you're friendly with might turn out to be an individual you absolutely can't agree with as soon as they're dealing with someone else, and it's even worse most people just tell you to live with it because these are things you need to ignore in order to stay connected.