A SOCIABLE AND A SOCIOPATH

“You are a difficult person.” I have said this to so many people, so often and so casually. Similarly, so many people have said it to me, so often and so casually. Essentially, what we all have said to convey to each other is: “It is difficult for me to convince you.” In other words, that is what we have said in jest, even to our most beloved ones, “You are a hard nut to crack.”

And, that’s a healthy way of living and loving… Is it not?

Why should we follow someone’s ideas and plans like sheep? Our differences and disagreements do not, and should not, mean we are hard stones - cold, rigid and frigid… It only means, we need to respect and accommodate each other’s views… That’s all.

So, from the healthy standard of the definition of the phrase, ‘Difficult Person’, we all are so, to some measure. But, certainly, we have our hearts in the right place and our conscience is not dead… We do feel for one another, and we cry, laugh and love. We are sociables and not sociopaths.

Yesterday morning, a friend of mine shared with me a write-up captioned, ‘Are you a Difficult Person’? The unknown author had pointed to, what he considered to be, some behavioural traits of a ‘Difficult Person’. My friend, who had shared this piece, and some of us, knew of a person who seemed to possess all of those traits. So, my friend had used a colourful vocabulary to vent out his feelings about this person…

It left me in splits!  

ARE YOU A DIFFICULT PERSON?

- Author unknown

1. If you think, that everyone is wrong and you are always right… You are making yourself a Difficult Person.

2. When you have something wrong to say about every good person or thing… You just might be a Difficult Person.

3. If you have gradually become too hard to please… Beware, you are becoming a Difficult Person.

4. When you argue about everything, even when there is no need for it…  Be careful, you are becoming a Difficult Person.

5. You know the reason why people do what they do. You pride yourself as a mind reader. Are you GOD? Of course, you are not… So, you are just a Difficult Person.

6. If everyone around you walks on egg shells. They'd rather not talk to you....You are a Difficult Person.

7. If you have a correction for everyone but none for yourself....You are a Difficult Person

8. If you never say ‘I am sorry’, or must be cajoled into saying it... You are a Difficult Person.

9. If you are too adamant about forgiving others... You are a Difficult Person.

10.  Dear Difficult Person, you have to be very careful. Otherwise, at some point in your Journey, you might discover you are walking alone!

Mercifully, this world has more sociable persons than sociopaths. If you closely note, all of us do possess a couple of those traits, if not all the time, in certain occasions, at least. As I said, that’s the sign that we are humans and we are fallible yet sociable. We are sound and healthy. But, let me tell you, this: there are those sociopaths around us, very few though, with their personality disorder. Let’s pray, we do not have much to do with them…  And, God-willing, if we have something to do with them, let’s pray to God, to help us maintain our own mental sanity…

The sociopath – with his chronic difficulty to be sociable – shall pay for his own deeds. Isolation, that is.

GERALD D’CUNHA

Pic.: Rashmi Sondhi