Tamara (@museguided): "No matter how good you are to people, it won’t necessarily make them good to you — kindness isn’t a contract, it’s a mirror. Some will see their reflection and soften; others will smash the glass just to feel powerful. Expecting reciprocity from the emotionally bankrupt is like …"

No matter how good you are to people, it won’t necessarily make them good to you — kindness isn’t a contract, it’s a mirror. Some will see their reflection and soften; others will smash the glass just to feel powerful. Expecting reciprocity from the emotionally bankrupt is like hoping a vending machine will dispense wisdom if you feed it enough coins. Give generously, but don’t confuse your virtue with their capacity. On the flip side, treating unkind people poorly will often cause them to cower and soften; treating kind people poorly will harden them. It’s as if being unkind is correlated to cowardice or maybe fear, where the unking person is stuck in some sort of first-strike paradigm where they have to get you before you get them. Yes, the preemptive strike is the classic armour of the wounded. Unkindness is often less about malice than it is about terror… the terror of being seen, the terror of being hurt, the terror of being powerless. So they lash out first, hoping to control the

No matter how good you are to people, it won’t necessarily make them good to you — kindness isn’t a contract, it’s a mirror. Some will see their reflection and soften; others will smash the glass just to feel powerful. Expecting reciprocity from the emotionally bankrupt is like hoping a vending machine will dispense wisdom if you feed it enough coins. Give generously, but don’t confuse your virtue with their capacity. On the flip side, treating unkind people poorly will often cause them to cower and soften; treating kind people poorly will harden them. It’s as if being unkind is correlated to