Why I Hate Confrontation

I'm a self-proclaimed loud mouth, but I hate confrontation. I hate having to stand up to people. This doesn't really make any sense, considering the fact that I have such a big mouth and basically communicate exclusively in sarcasm and dry jokes. But I hate when people call me on my shit, for some reason.

I think it might be because it makes me self-aware of what a crappy person I really am. The kind of person that I really am, or that I think that I am, is always floating around in the back of my mind, but when people call me out on my shit, I'm suddenly very aware of how crappy I can be. I also hate being the centre of attention for negative reasons, and that obviously also comes as a part of this. I have a huge mouth when it comes to making fun of other people, but as soon as someone starts calling me out for it, I just shut down and walk away, feeling ashamed of myself.

That's probably why I hate confrontation so much, to be honest. I hate the feelings of shame and guilt, as I'm sure most people do, but I'm also one of those people that stays up late at night and lays in the dark, thinking about all the shitty things I've ever done. I've done some crappy stuff and carried the guilt around with me and then confessed and apologized, and for those things, I don't feel any guilt anymore because I have nothing to be guilty about. Everything's out in the open, and I'm not lying. It's just the shame that persists that I would even do what I did in the first place.

I also often act before thinking about what the potential consequences could be, and I feel like that is a huge contributor to these feelings, and is also obviously very much something that is my fault. I say things I shouldn't just to get a laugh out of someone or because I think it's going to be funny and it actually isn't. I think that maybe it connects back to all these crazy, anxiety-ridden feelings I have about my friends all thinking that I'm really annoying and that they don't actually want to be my friend at all. I get so self-conscious about that sometimes, and have such social anxiety surrounding it, that I guess I try and be funny in a rude way to make them like me, even though it probably just portrays me as a rude and bitchy person that I am on the inside. The thing is, I don't want to be that person. I don't want to be someone that everyone looks at and thinks "Oh, she's such a bitch." But I feel like I made myself into that person by saying the things that I do.

The other thing about me is that I love watching drama unfold for other people, and I love gossip, but only when it's not about me or any of my friends. When drama and gossip involve my friends, especially my high school girlfriends, damn does shit get crazy fast. Grade 12 was maybe the most dramatic year of my life in terms of how much shit was going on behind the scenes between my friends for a number of different reasons, and in those situations, I get really annoyed because people won't just talk to each other. I've always been a huge proponent of communicating with people and letting them know how you feel so that you can avoid unnecessary issues, but that year, my friends and I did none of that. It was horrible.

I just cannot handle drama when it involves me. It always seems to get way out of hand very quickly, and always seems to result in a row of confrontations and issues, but they never seemed to happen in person. They always seemed to happen over Facebook or over text, and that just made them worse because you can't convey tone properly that way, and so messages were taken incorrectly and it just makes everything way messier. Confrontation and talks like those with your friends about problems you're having are messy enough, but then to add on the additional element of texting just makes it one hundred times worse than it could be.

Confrontation just makes me more self-aware of my faults and causes a lot of issues. In a world with high levels of digital communication, they can just get really out of hand because of the lack of context that comes with body language and adds unnecessary levels of complication to things. On top of this, it's just a personal thing for me that makes me more self-conscious of my faults, like I said, and how much of a crappy person that I can be, and that's definitely not my favourite thing in the world to have to think about or acknowledge.