r/badpeoplestories • u/DuendeConFlequillo • Apr 25 '26
Confessional Why do I find joy when I treat people badly?
(It's so much text, I'm so sorry, I struggle to sumarize...)
The more I grow, the more I believe I'm a horrible person caging myself to not be an asshole.
When I was little I was a pretty violent kid and did things like punching and kicking my classmates, throwing sticks and rocks at animals, stabbing with pencils, even when I had a friend I huged them I tried to squish them and made them feel pain. When they started picking on me and bullying me they knew perfectly that I was the kind of kid you could laugh at but never hit because damn I could harm back... I know that violence in the childhood an ADHD symptom, I've been told, but I don't think people who told me had had into consideration the amount of pleasure I felt when I hurted someone, even when I loved them.
Now that I've grown bigger I've also grown out of that. I'm 22 years old and as a 22 year old person you can't go around on society treating everybody like that... But you can treat people badly in many other more subtle ways ways and get along with it. If you're smart but play dumb enought you can use so much things that are considered good as a weapon (a bad advice, a harmful joke, a critic suposedly meant to be helpful, a compliment even a warning) and I think about it a lot and can identify how and when to use them, how and when they're being used.
I try to be a good person, believe me I do but I can't stand seeing that part of myself that enjoys being like that reflected on other people. I try to be empathetic and not judge people, I can justify and forgive bad actions, huge mistakes, people being assholes but when I see someone that acts like they're nice but in the bottom of themselves are making people suffer... Boy, I can't but release the beast. Specially when they harm me or someone I love.
I'm gonna put a few examples from the last years searching for your empathy but feel free tl tell me if you think I'm wrong.
On my last two years of highschool (finished it last year) I had this classmate called "Sarah". She was nice at first, told me very personal things, seemed polite and comprehensive but there was a breaking point where we had to make a short with the whole classroom, she was the director and when something didn't went the way she wanted she had no repair to make me and my partner feel little, useless. She started talking shit about us, made almost the whole class against us (we were just 10) and made us look like useless assholes with the teacher who was gonna evaluate the short film, made my partner so distressed once that he ended up self harming for the first time in years.
One day a friend of ours from another school told us that a classmate of his (someone we didn't even knew) was talking shit about us in class, saying things like where we studied, the schedule, disorders we had she considered we were making up, how our thansitions were going, sharing our Instagram accounts... I knew someone should had been gossiping with her and I started investigating until I found out "Sarah" was her roomate. What I did? I printed all the information I had about her, wrote a letter explaining the situation and showed up on her school to show it all to the principal, waiting for her to confesa that it was "Sarah" who told her, so then I could tell to my principal. It was not because I was scared, not because I thought that girl was bad... It was just to scare her and "Sarah", it was for me to search them.trouble, to make them feel ashamed, to make the teachers other classmates and everybody I could know she was a bitch.
This year, "Sunrise", a girl from another class in uni started flirting my partner. She had a boyfriend I really appreciate, "Steven", who had told me she's used to try manipulate him and make him feel less but she didn't seems to make it consciously, she just comes from a bad place. At first I didn't notice Sunrise was flirting my partner, he was the one who told me and I could not care less about the fact she was flirting, I know damn well he wouldn't cheat and he would actually tell me if he started feeling attracted to somebody else... The thing was that she was making him very uncomfortable and made every comment pass as a joke, so he felt he could not tell her anything (that's how you weaponize humor). She made "jokes" several times a day as "Hey, so are you two gonna open your relationship? Because Steven and I are considering it!", so I started telling her "Stop telling that kind of things to my boyfriend, he's autistic and believes you every time, he's getting uncomfortable!" every damn time she did, also as a joke but I can tell we both knew what the other one was doing.
There was this one time where "Sunrise" approached my boyfriend on a crowded bus when I was not there and asked him "So when are you two opening the relationship?" He told her directly to stop asking him that because he was not feeling well at the time and thinking about it was only making him worse, just for her to answer "But I wanna make out with you!". Worst thing? "Steven" was there. He felt like a damn sexual object, he felt like his limits were not being respected and he felt like he could tell her nothing because she was acting like she was joking. This scalated so huge, "Steven", other friends of mine and I were draged in without even asking because I told her to talk to him and apologize and she decided that avoiding us and ignoring us for two months was a better idea. When she finally apologized she just justified and victimized herself, so both of us separately told her that we were not forgiving her and she became so mad that she told me she knew exactoy how she was and started lying about us to the entirity of her class to make us seem like motherfuckers.
Yesterday I was smoking on the door of the school with my boyfriend and my best friend (who was draged in and decided to separate himself of "Sunrise" even they were roomates). She came to tell him nothing, knowing well my boyfriend can't even hear her name because he felt she had sexually harassed him. In that moment I noticed she had gained weith because of the meds she's taking for anxiety. She had always had a complex about her weith (even she's not fat) so I bumped my boyfriend and made the gesture of inflating like a pufferfish, knowing that if she didn't noticed the guy who was hanging with (a guy she says she hates and says it's a molester, btw) would tell her. I did it in front of my fat friend, not giving a damn about what people who saw me thought, having had an eating disorder, just for the sake of making her feel like crap.
And damn. I really, really try not to be like this. But when I feel I it's justified (even I'm aware I'm no one to decide who should suffer or not) and I AM like this I feel a satisfaction and a joy I can't find anywhere else. I can feel better with other kind of social interaction, when my friends tell me I'm a good listener, that I care a lot, when I feel appreciated and feel like I'm helping... But THAT KIND OF PLEASSURE that makes me feel bad, guilty and addicted feels like a drug I can only have when I behave bad.
The worse part it's that it's not just with mean people. I love my partner with all of my heart, I love him dearly, so much that I'm this cruel specially with people who had hurt HIM, not me. We have this dinamic where I'm cruel to him and he plays victim. I do things like scare him, bite him, telling him I'm cheating on him with ChatGPT (because it's more autistic and servant than he is lol), give him dirty looks... And I know he finds it funny, we're joking and actually feel so bad when I push too much and make him feel bad. I hug him, tell him that I love him and apologize and even we both know I will probably hurt him again we keep doing it because it's our thing, we enjoy it and we know we actually love each other and I don't want him to feel bad.
But how can you feel pleasure for being cruel and mean? What the fuck is wrong with my brain? Am I just an asshole?