mylifeinrambles.blog

I am not nice. I have never been described as nice by anyone who has actually known me. Cool, funny, direct, intense, a lot — sure. I have heard all of these. I have heard several of them in the same sentence. But nice has never been on the list, and I have made my peace with that.

I am, however, kind. Which I would like the record to reflect, because the two words get used interchangeably and they should not. They mean very different things, and the difference matters more than people realize.

Here is what I think. Nice is a want. Kind is a need.

My mom raised me on the wants-versus-needs distinction. You want the candy. You need dinner. You want the new shoes. You need shoes that fit. She drilled it in over years, the way moms drill things in when they want you to remember them after you leave the house. And somewhere along the way it stopped being about objects and started being a framework for everything. Including, eventually, how I think about people.

Nice is what you want from somebody. You want them to smile at you. You want them to laugh at your joke. You want them to tell you the outfit looks great. You want them to agree the project is a good idea. You want them to not bring up the thing you’re avoiding. You want everything to feel smooth and pleasant and conflict-free.

Kind is what you need from somebody. You need them to tell you when the spinach is in your teeth. You need them to flag the typo in the email before you hit send. You need them to ask how you’re actually doing, not the version where you say fine and they say good and you both move on. You need them to mention, gently and once, that the project might have a problem worth solving before it ships. You need someone who would tell you, if it came down to it, that you were the one in the wrong.

Nice feels good in the moment. Kind makes the moment slightly uncomfortable in service of the longer good.

Or, the way I said it to a friend the other day, which has been rattling around my head ever since:

Nice feels like lies, and kind feels real.

I’m not saying nice people are lying. Plenty of nice people are perfectly honest. But the function of nice — the social purpose it serves — is usually to keep things easy. To soothe. To smooth. To avoid the uncomfortable conversation. And I have noticed, over many years of observing humans up close, that a lot of nice is a kind of dishonesty in a friendly costume. Not malicious. Just convenient.

Kind, on the other hand, costs something. Kindness is the friend who tells you, I love you and I’m not going to keep watching you do this to yourself. Kindness is the parent who says, I know you wanted me to say yes, but the answer is no, and here’s why. Kindness is the colleague who pulls you aside before the meeting and says, I think you’re going in with the wrong number. It is rarely smooth. It is rarely pleasant in the moment. It is almost always, in retrospect, the thing you needed.

Here is the part of this that I have to be honest about, because otherwise the piece reads as if I’m patting myself on the back.

Being kind without being nice has real costs. I get called a lot. I get called intense. I get called too much. I have made people uncomfortable in conversations that, in my view, needed someone to say the thing nobody else was saying. I have lost friendships over telling the truth at a moment when the friendship would have preferred the smoother lie. I have, more than once, been the unpopular voice in the room.

And that is the cost. People who are nice are easier to be around. They lubricate the social machinery. They keep things light. I am not light. I have never been light. I am, as far as I can tell, structurally incapable of being light, which I suspect has to do with being raised by a woman who taught me the difference between what people want and what they need before I could ride a bike.

But — and this is the part I want anyone reading this to actually take in — many of the people who have really known me are still here. My daughter, who knows what flavor of mom I am and has not, to my knowledge, considered swapping me out. The handful of people who have figured out, over time, that the price of admission to my friendship is being told the truth, and the reward is being told the truth.

Those people are not in my life because I was nice to them. Those people are in my life because, at some point along the way, when they needed somebody to be real with them, I was. And they noticed. And they stayed.

That, I think, is the trade. You can have a wider circle of people who like being around you because you are pleasant and unchallenging. Or you can have a smaller circle of people who know you would tell them the truth if it mattered, and who, when the moment comes, are glad you exist.

I would rather have the second one. I have apparently always wanted the second one, because I have apparently always been doing the things that produce it.

So. To clarify, for the record:

If you have met me and walked away thinking she’s not very nice — you may be correct. I will not be appealing the ruling.

If you have known me for a while and stuck around, you probably already know what I am. And what I am is, I hope, kind. Even when it isn’t pleasant. Especially when it isn’t pleasant.

Nice is a want. Kind is a need. You only need one of them in your life, and I would very much prefer to be the one someone needs.