By Paula Bianchi –

Free-will means you can choose to say or do anything in your life to yourself or others. From the moment you wake up until you go to bed, you make a conscious choice about what kind of mood you’re going to be in, which in turn, determines how you’re going to treat others.

It’s an enigma how any given person is going to react to the negative or positive things that are either happening to them or going on around them. Even a happy person can be driven to be mean, especially if they’re being harassed by negativity.

A lot of times, a person chooses to be mean as a reaction to emotions that they can’t control. Emotions like: jealousy, envy, anger, frustration, fear, grief, and selfishness can make people lash out at the first person they see be it a friend, family member, or stranger. Sometimes we can walk in at the wrong moment when a person is struggling with something they’re doing, so they say something mean, which in most cases, they don’t mean and wish they can take back. Lashing out with anger happens in a spilt second. This can cause feelings of remorse and regret especially if it wasn’t your intention to be mean. We have to be mindful of our emotions because sometimes they’re like a pressure cooker just waiting to explode.

Bullies choose to be mean as a way to feel superior and in control. It makes them happy to cause fear in someone. They’re showing off to their friends how they can make someone cower. Most times, bullies are victims of being bullied too like from a parent, sibling, or another family member. It’s very difficult dealing with a bully in your life. No matter how hard you try to avoid them, they seek you out like a missile because something inside of them enjoys these confrontational events, and they feed off the negative energy it produces making them feel like they have power over you.  

Some people are just mean-spirited awful people who get off on making other people miserable. They’ll do anything within their power to harass the subject of their ire. These are the people who are at their happiest when they’re mean. There’s no dealing with these people. What they do is totally out of our control. We can only control how we’re going to react to them. It never pays for us to react in a mean way back. It just fuels their ire and lowers our energy to match theirs.

There’s being mean by pranking somebody. This type of ‘mean’ can range from the mundane to the extreme depending on the person who’s being pranked.  Harmless pranks that are done in all good fun, can be the highlight of parties and family events, but the pranks which are done out of malice to humiliate and hurt someone are hard to forgive. With every action, there’s a reaction. Something that may have started out as being well intended, may not be received in the same manner. Sometimes pranks set the stage for revenge.

The “eye for an eye” kind of being mean can escalate into some very hurtful behavior because of two people who can’t let anything go until they destroy each other. This can be a very long and drawn out battle witnessed by family and friends. Only the person who chooses to walk away from the negativity, will win.

Racism is part of being mean to anybody who’s not like you, but we all belong to one race. The human race. We just come in different packages. One of the reasons God split the masses after the Tower of Babel was built was because he wanted us to spread across the Earth, be fruitful and multiply. How did he do this? By giving us different languages, which gave us our different beliefs and customs. People who are mean to others who are not like them, can lash out with hatred and intolerance. This type of being mean has followed us throughout our history. All of us, as a society, are being tested again and again to step up to putting an end to racism, but as long as there’s going to be haters out there, it seems like we’ll never learn this very important lesson, and it will be repeated, into our future history, until we do.  

All of us have dealt with someone being ‘petty’ mean to us. These are the people who stir up shit around us and towards us. They’re the ones causing problems for us at work, school, or at home. They turn something we love doing into something we dread. We’ll suffer from the consequences of their petty meanness, by losing our jobs, friends, or our significant others, which is what they set out to do in the first place. To me, these are the energy vampires. They create chaos in our lives for the sole purpose of getting a reaction out of us. As soon as your gone, they focus their attention on their next victim. Doing this to others, brings them happiness and joy but drains the energy out of us, which they feed on.   

Being mean is something that’s in us from the day we’re born, but we don’t know we’re doing it. It’s up to our parents to point it out and teach us to not be mean. They need to teach us about empathy. In Denmark, they have a mandatory class in grade school that teaches empathy since the mid 90’s. Because of this class, they’ve seen the instances of bullying decline to the point of it being non-existent.  

As with all emotions, being mean can be controlled if you truly want to. It takes a conscious choice to be done with this negativity. With a little concentrated effort, you can overcome being mean because free-will dictates that you can. It’s just a matter of choice.

In my next Mind Games article, I’ll write about the importance of gratitude. Thanks for the visit, and I’m grateful to see you here. Bye for now.

Email: Remyel@hotmail.com