Someone Else's Scale

I have been thinking about feeling entitled. It has become one of those phrases people use to describe other people's expectations, whether founded or unfounded. But should we really feel entitled, or otherwise?

I guess it depends.

There are two separate incidents that made me truly question the phrase. While the incidents themselves were different, they had several things in common. In both cases, there was important information that could have helped me avoid a predicament had it been shared with me, whether formally or informally. The people in question had known the other person much longer than they had known me. They also carried relatively the same social status, including age and professional standing, and that seemed to become the basis for protecting the other person rather than informing me.

I never thought such distinctions could cause a different outcome for me, but they it served as a reminder that even the littlest thing can generate the biggest headaches. The headache I currently have was so avoidable that it makes the situation even more annoying. Somewhere in that annoyance, though, I began to question why I thought they were obligated to give me this information in the first place.

Until now, I had never bothered to weigh our relationship in that way: who is more likely to respect, share and offer more than the other? How valuable, or otherwise, am I to these people? At what point did I decide they were trustworthy enough for me to expect loyalty from them? Had their loyalty always mattered, been in question, or simply never been tested until now?

Then I asked myself the difficult question: am I being entitled?

This is where I stopped.

Because maybe entitlement is another overly abused word we use to justify our own unaccountability, particularly when someone doesn't want to explain why they chose not to extend the same, or at least an appreciable, level of trust to another person. It becomes easy to hide behind people are so entitled when the expectation might not have appeared from nowhere.

Then again, maybe I expect too much from people and ought to manage my expectations, sugarcoat my disappointment and completely remove the thin blindfold that makes it difficult for me to see the measure at which I am being weighed by the other person.

But that is also what makes disappointment useful. It doesn't necessarily tell us that we were wrong to expect something, or that the other person was wrong not to give it. Sometimes it simply reveals that two people had assigned completely different values to the same relationship.

We can't mean the world to everyone we call a friend, and we shouldn't expect to. But every now and then, something happens that forces us to see where we sit on someone else's scale and the difficult part isn't always discovering that they didn't tell us, choose us or protect us in the way we expected.

It's discovering that we thought we were someone they would.