Sometimes I think I am a bad person

“Sometimes I think I am a bad person.”

My friend and I are walking down the street.  The mid afternoon sun was beating heavily on us.  She turns her head and looks at me through her dark sunglasses.  Her eyebrows furrow.  “You’re not a bad person.”  she says trying to comfort me.  “Why would you say that?”

I stare ahead trying to watch my step.  I have a tendency to trip on anything in my path.  I take a moment to gather my thoughts.  “The other day I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen in a while.  She’s a writer like me,  although I had been unaware of this until that same day.  She mentioned she had a begun a blog about two years ago.  She also has a book she self-published.  Hearing all of this, I realized she is much farther along in her career than me.  I became saddened  by this.”  I pause for a moment.

We slow down and sit on a bench on the sidewalk.  “That’s it?  That’s why you think you are a bad person.  Because you were jealous?”  my friend says surprised.

“No, that’s not why.  There’s more.”  Watching people pass by, I continue.  “I went home and read her blog.  Immediately, I felt better.”

My friend raises her eyebrow and glances at me.  “Better?  Why?”

We both turn and watch woman with a cute puppy go by.  “Because it was full of grammatical errors.  It was full of missing words or ones misspelled.  She used little or no punctuation.  It was clear she had not proofread it.  A couple of mistakes would have been fine, but it was littered with errors.  Simply put it looked like it was written by someone who had never opened up a grammar book in their life. ”

“That’s an awful thing to say.  You’re being very critical.”

“I know!”  I throw up my hands in the air.  “See, that’s why I think I am bad person.”  I bury face in hands leaning forward.

My friend puts her hand on my back.  “You’re not a bad person, just human.”