Did I Do That?: Unlucky For Others

You ever feel like nothing ever seems to go your way? It is a horrible thing to feel like you can never do anything right, but it may be even worse to feel like you are always messing things up for other people. Or maybe it doesn’t, but you may be a jerk. It could be that you have a particular condition or illness that is relatively burdensome, like, you are vegan and all your friends eat meat, or something far more serious. This forces you to ask yourself if you should spare your friends and family the trouble of hanging around if your clumsiness, wheel chair, body odor,lack of ability to keep it in your pants,  or any other personal imperfection, is going to continue to be a problem.

This may come to a point of intervention, where the people that do care about you decide to step in for your sake and their own. Before this though, there is a moment when you may want to take precautionary steps to protect them from you. There is always that rough and tumble guy telling his girlfriend she’s too good for him and that everything close to him gets ruined. Feeling like you are “bad news” can be isolating and cause a certain kind of unparalleled torment.

So what do you do if you are the lone survivor of a plane crash and death is following you to even the score but it also harming the people around you? Give in? Fight back? It is hard to say and could be based on the trouble you are dealing with but there are a few things to consider.

It might be worthwhile to look at whether the situation is really any different for you than anyone else or if you perceiving it as unique. If you borrow someone’s car and get in an accident, it should be understood that is a reasonable risk. You should be sorry, but not necessarily spiral into a black hole of guilt. Now, as per Southern California DUI laws, if you are a driving drunk and cause the accident, where there are serious injuries or fatalities the guilt may be a little more appropriate but this is an extreme case.

Consider how the other people in your community feel about you, and better yet, ask them. One of the best ways to find out if something is all in your head is to get some feed back from others. If what you get back affirms your feeling then you know there is some work to do. But not all is lost, because those very friends may be your support system to addressing the issue.

This is all very dramatic at this point, it could be that you are simply a vegan, or generally different than your friends in some way that is nothing to apologize for. Just be yourself, these are the differences that make our groups dynamic. An even better idea would be to share your lifestyle with your friends and cook them dinner one night.

We must look at what we are referring to as negative behavior before we go removing ourselves from groups. We also should look at the group itself and decide if it is a health community to be a part of. Sometimes the “it’s not you, it’s me.” line isn’t applicable. The problem could be outside of your control.

Back to luck. Fortune is a fickle thing and most relationships should be strong enough to sustain a temporary, even extended, rift in the situation of a person involved. The strongest of relationships will often endure these rifts collectively. What you ask of your relationships is up to you, but you should feel like you can ask as much as you would be willing to give while doing your best not to live in a house of cards.