One of my great strengths is I’m a very loyal person. If you’re a colleague, a romantic partner or a friend, I’ll stick with you – sometimes to absurd lengths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of my great weaknesses is I’m a very loyal person. I’ve stuck with some friendships, and other relationships, that didn’t deserve it. If you’re a colleague, a romantic partner or a friend, I’ll take a lot of fairly pointless and demeaning abuse on what my inner critic thinks is “principle”, but is really more equal parts inertia, a childhood of not having a lot of close frieends, and excessive self-doubt (as noted by others<\/a>). <\/p>\n\n\n\n A great example was the long-gone and utterly unlamented “Dog Gone”. She’d been a social acquaintance, even a friend of sorts, going back to the ’80s. She’d known my kids when they were babies. And when she turned up on the blog, a few years later, I figured “good – let’s see what happens”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We all know how that turned out. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I mean, things started out OK. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And then, as the wheels slowly wobbled off, I figured “Dogs are gonna Dog”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For a while, it devolved to the fact I just enjoyed watching the smart people in the comments curb-stomping her, week after week – although as her “technique” degenerated into “pooping and running”, that fun didn’t last long. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, of course, she used her 20+ year old contact with my family to take a deeply bizarre and very personal swipe at me. Something so over the top, so biliously narcissistic that even I had enough. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That arc took about a decade. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Because loyalty is wasted on some people. <\/p>\n\n\n\n No, that’s not accurate. It’s more true to say I waste loyalty on some people. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I’m not going to say that changed me, particularly – “Dog Gone” wasn’t a close <\/em>friend, and jettisoning that fairly peripheral relationship had no effect on my life or how I live it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But it’s a bit of a cue that I have a tendency to misallocate loyalty. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Apropos not much. <\/p>\n\n\n\n More later in the week. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of my great strengths is I’m a very loyal person. If you’re a colleague, a romantic partner or a friend, I’ll stick with you – sometimes to absurd lengths. One of my great weaknesses is I’m a very loyal person. I’ve stuck with some friendships, and other relationships, that didn’t deserve it. If you’re […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mitch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=86496"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":86497,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86496\/revisions\/86497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=86496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=86496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=86496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}