Justine ou les Malheurs de la Vertu. (ENG)

Helping people is the worst idea that you can have. Just like being nice to anyone at all. Seriously, maybe you can help animals and small, innocent children. That’s all. Unfortunately, I cannot control my compulsive tendencies to help others and all my life I have seen it come round and bite my ass.  

What goes around, doesn’t come around

You can for example employ your very talented, or pretty much genius friend, who calls you crying that her boss wants to lower her salary by a quarter. She’s really good, you can’t afford such an employee. But then you decide that you do, in fact, want someone like her in your company because it will help you grow. So you take out a loan. Not for her salary but to equip her workplace. You hire her. And what? Fail.

That friend comes late to work every day and half an hour before she’s supposed to leave, she starts a foot washing session (seriously!) and fixing her make up. But the real nightmare starts when you help her write her divorce papers so that she can get rid of her husband – in her opinion an alcoholic and a loser. Then the girl, after a series of dates resembling a cat in a wild heat, starts to go out with a strange guy who looks like a dwarf, simultaneously complaining during lunch breaks about how terrible he is in bed. But that doesn’t stop her from being at least two hours late every Monday, which makes the rest of the team mess up their work too. Finally, out of nowhere, she gets pregnant, even though merely two months earlier you asked her to give you time to train another person to do her job in case she had such plans in mind. Unfortunately, it all comes as a surprise. And let’s be honest, it’s hard to get knocked up just like that by a guy who can’t come inside a woman because he’s addicted to getting off on his own (about which she informs the entire team, when she’s not talking about her haemorrhoids). And then she almost gives your man, and simultaneously your business partner, a heart attack, coming to work once again not at 10am, but 1pm. 

Money that disappears

You have mercy on one unemployed person, then another one. One uses your company’s equipment to do their side jobs, another constantly cheats you but you won’t fire her because the poor thing has a sick husband. Fail. You take on one such poor thing. You show them the way, educate them and send them to university. Fail. Another one because you have mercy for this poor thing that has some talent but has a shitty life. She’s talented and draws well but having finished law school that she hated and living with a fucked up mummy, she won’t go far. You teach her, give her roof over her head, feed her and put clothes on her back. Another fail! The girl cheats you at the first opportunity. You help her start her own business, you’re supposed to work together. What does the poor thing do? She steals one of your employees, right in the middle of the season. And years on she makes herself look like a star, basing her work upon the construction of your products. Despite that – you forgive. You let go of all the small sins because you already have other goals in your life. You let go but she can’t. What makes her angry at you? Criticising the looks of one of her models. It’s only two sentences but the hurt is real! I mean, you can forgive her disgraceful behaviour towards you but she will never forget offending a friend walking the same paths. Fail, fail and fail again.

You help another person, you have faith in her business. You have so much faith that you give her a huge delivery of stock on credit. Tens of thousands zlotys. And what? How could it be any different, years pass by and the payback consists of transferring you a couple of hundreds every few months. But you’re happy anyway that at least one person has shown some decency towards you. Not like that friend you took care of after she broke up with her boyfriend. You take her out to dinner, pay for her SPA visit and then lend her rent money so that the landlord doesn’t kick her out of her flat. To this day I haven’t seen a single penny from the money she borrowed.

People who let you down

Another poor thing has a patent for ‘the victim of domestic abuse’. You help her. And what turns out? That the husband didn’t abuse anyone but she was the one to sleep with probably every man she’s ever met and she also decided to make a porno with her ex and her neighbour. No, she’s not a nymphomaniac. Worse! It’s not sex that excites her, it’s the possibility of manipulating people – for which she uses her sexuality. You’re rolling on the floor laughing when you see her in photos – nine months pregnant (fourth child on the way), in a wedding dress, with a smiling new husband and her neighbour – yes the one from the porno. What a cool effect – perfect for a white gown. It gets a little less funny when you find out that she’s shown those questionable videos to your contractor. When it would really be high time for you to cure yourself from altruism once and for all, when the goodness should evaporate from your little heart, you have mercy on another hurt being who… does exactly what the others did. Fail. Fail. Fail. Are there any pills for stupidity? I may have 180 IQ points. But I’m stupid nonetheless. I was born this way and I’ll probably day this way too. Unless my therapist does something about it but I highly doubt.

Being nice, just like that, doesn’t pay either. For example, being nice to a guy, and even more so showing him special treatment, finds its end in him getting into a relationship with a divorcee damaged by life with two kids and fake nails hailing from a German discotheque. Well, maybe she doesn’t mind the fact that she’s just one out of many, apparently she’s not scared of catching some VD from him. She pulls money out of a guy and she’s happy as it is. And you were nice. You didn’t want anything from him, besides his presence only. Then another guy, having to choose between you and an average, chubby girl, chooses the sow (right when you started being nice – a coincidence?). Choosing to be in a ‘relationship’ with her doesn’t stop him from waking you up at night with photos of his dicks. After all it doesn’t matter whether you have any feelings for him and you’re trying to forget. He has to hurt you again and again and again. Because it’s so hard to think. He has to get you all excited and then mention that he has stability with the other one. And it’s actually hard to disagree, because considering all the recent hurricanes, his choice was purely rational – it’s always easier to hold onto a thigh twice as fat as yours. Right?

You want to help? Take the risk into consideration!

Right before writing this I wanted to help my guy friend meet up with his girlfriend. The girl lives in another country. She has been wailing to me online for weeks now, waffling about how much she loves and misses him. Then I think to myself that maybe we should take a trip together. My girlfriend and I will do some sightseeing, the costs will be divided by several people and they can be in love, if I can’t. And you know what? The girl let go of him. Just like that, one day she fell out of love. And the curtain drops here.

I will never be nice to anyone again. To no one. Even if I have to tattoo this reminder on my forehead, I will be a mean, cold, insensitive bitch and a monster in human skin. I prefer to direct my catastrophic tendencies to be everyone’s mother and save the world towards helping abandoned animals and sick children, intensifying all my efforts.  They won’t thank me. And that’s for the best, because I never wanted to receive any thanks or payment. I just wanted the people whom I helped to not hurt me in return. Is it too much? But you know what? People hate when others help them. The don’t like to owe anyone anything. So whenever you help them get up, get ready for them to kick your ass as hard as they can. In reality people hate kindness. Perversely they like it when someone beats them down and destroys them. And don’t even try to borrow money from me. I have too many… other expenses. And I bet on isolation.

*perhaps because of all these scumbags the person who really deserves and needs help, won’t receive it - and that’s the biggest kind of foulness.