People obsessed with your flaws

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I was stuck with these people for four years, and I can't think of myself as anything else other than the person they molded me into.

^^ok, let me get this straight, you say these people molded you into a person you don't like?

Wait, maybe next time I feel down because of things they've said in the past, I should perhaps keep in mind this one time when I kind of burned them. I created this vaguebook-style status about how my haters weren't really dissing me but the person I pretended to be, and they were puzzled and generally like, "What kind of person are you at home? What have you hiding from us?''

^^^that'll work

I'm not saying I deserved to be mistreated as they did to me, but we had our own realities, I guess. They saw me as an overly vulnerable cry-baby who ruined group projects, and I saw in them some other people who mistreated me when I was younger.

The main reason for our personality clash would be the fact that they were raised to be like everyone else in the world, whereas I was raised to be more of a special snowflake who melts easily under pressure, and it didn't help when we had group projects.

I met this situation once in my working life, for half a year I worked in London with a supervisory engineer who seemed to pick out the most tiny flaw in things I did, and I found my work actually deteriorated under this situation because my wn confidence took a hit.

It resolved itself when I obtained a secondment to the organisation's operation in Belfast, Northern Ireland., and when returning two years later our paths crossed only on rare occasions.

It was an odd working relationship, and others in the firm also commented it was not always easy working with that engineer.

I could salvage the situation to some degree in my own mind by keeping in mind the qualities which made hiom a dam fine engineer - attention to detail and encyclopiedic knowledge of the field in which we worked.

By his own admission he had no sense of humour. I also recall him making modifications to rthe systems and environment based on overhearing snippets of user conversation, and being very insistent that we replaced carpet tiles in the same place if we had to lift the floor to do any cable installation or tracing.

Last point I recalled recently was the way he walked, and it struck me that the walk may well have been an unobtrusive form of stimming. I do wonder if my supervisor all those years ago was one of that lost generation of un-diagnosed or borderline people, very skilled in their field to the point that the blind spots in the people skills tended to be overlooked, and the obsessive tendencies tended to result in installations ended up working better than when first installed.

I think the problem here was their incapability to forget my past self. When I met these people, I was an attention-seeker who was really immature even for a 16 year old and with lots of unlikable traits, like Captain Obvious tendencies, talking like a child with that pouty voice that most people outgrow at 11-13, and acting flamboyant then somehow expecting people not to figure out that I was gay. Also, I had this tendency to let my motor mouth run too much, to the point that I occasionally said unintentionally mean things. I've realized that if you don't like someone's guts because they have actual flaws, don't get angry towards them, or you might traumatize them. Just calmly say what you think is wrong with them.

Well, there's nothing to say that you have to be nice to them. Why not bring up some of their flaws in a brutal crushing criticism? Try it, it's fun.