Have you ever experienced to be in a situation where someone pointed out your mistakes just for that person to stand out?
In Filipino term, we call it "bida-bida" and it's kinda annoying sometimes.
Let me share my experiences before when I encountered a person like that.
I remember the time when I failed to get a perfect score in our exam when I was in Grade 7, one of my classmates (who got a perfect mark given the fact also that she considered me as her competitor in the honor roll) laughed at me and spread different humors about me being an idiot.
She said that I wasn't deserving to rank ahead of her (just because of that perfect score of her without considering other factors) because she thought that she's way more intelligent than me, but I didn't feel bad about that because I knew to myself that those words of her doesn't define me at all. She did it to my other classmates as well especially those included in the honor roll, but they just smiled at her, and I'm very proud of them for responding maturely at such a young age as mine that time.
Most of my classmates doesn't like her attitude but they didn't show it directly to her face. She's fond of pointing out someone's mistakes then she will use it to compliment herself.
And it goes like this:
(She said it in Filipino language, but I've translated it to English so everyone can understand).
When someone got a low score and she got the highest, she will utter:
Why did you get a low score? Are you not learning at all, or you are just a natural idiot? I don't know how it feels since I am intelligent. Have you seen my scores yet?
But, when someone got the highest score than her, she will react like this:
Maybe you cheated that's why you've got a score like that. I don't believe you at all, I will tell everyone about it especially to our teacher. Just wait for it.
Or sometimes, she will backstab everyone silently by spreading humors without proper evidences then when someone pointed her out as the mastermind, she will not admit her bad actions.
I just want to share as well my experience with her being a writer in our school publication. As a grade 7 student (a newbie in high school) there's a screening first before being appointed as a writer. We are given some topics and our adviser instructed us to write different articles regarding that which will be passed the next day. Everyone got tensed and excited at the same time, including me whose not familiar about writing an article in journalism field since I've never been experienced to be a campus journalist before unlike my companions their, including her.
The next day, everyone of us submitted our outputs and we are given a time to wait for the results. After a couple of hours, they called all of us to be informed about the results, if whose in and out.
I don't want to brag, but I got a compliment from the Campus Journalism (CJ) adviser from the articles I wrote, but there are still some minimal errors I've committed, and I'm fine with it since I'm not expecting myself to write perfectly for the first time.
But, she (the person whom I'm talking about since the beginning of this article) was fed up with criticisms regarding her mistakes on the articles she submitted. She felt bad about that based on my observation. It's a usual response tho, so I don't blame her for that. But the problem is, she began to drag me down. She told everyone that I cheated by means of plagiarizing someone's work from the internet because according to her I have the full resources to do so, since we have gadgets and laptop at home which I could probably use. She doesn't have any evidences at all, but some students still believed on what she said.
As much as I wanted to ignore her that time, I can't just sit and stay silent considering that my image was stained by false accusations of her.
I opened-up about it to my teachers, then they promised me to fix the issue. Happy to say that everything went perfectly fine, but her attitude, I think it can't be easily fixed. It takes time of course and it doesn't work like magic.
I don't want to make fun of her even if I don't personally like her attitude and behavior. Crab mentality should not be tolerated. So, at that moment, me and my other classmates decided to help her out by appreciating her own self without invalidating someone's works and values.
She never listened to us at first, but slowly she began to accept everything maybe because she realized her mistakes. And that made us feel delighted knowing that someone was trying to change even in a slow phase. Slow progress is still a progress, so that made us proud a bit.
She said sorry, but she couldn't help but to show that attitude of her for quite some time, but atleast it was reduced. We can't force her to remove that attitude in an instant, so giving her time to change fully will be a great idea for her to realized everything.
I hope there will come a time that her negative attitudes will turn into a positive ones. I hope she will find the happiness she deserves, and she will not need to pull someone down because honestly that won't really help her out to be on top.
CONCLUSION
It's never been okay to drag someone down just to lift yourself up.
It's never okay to point out someone's mistakes to let yourself taste the successes in life.
It's doesn't work like that. If you want to succeed, then work for it in your own, without stepping on others' lives. You don't have to invalidate someone just because you want yourself to get accepted by others.
It's better to help others by turning their mistakes into lessons and motivations to go on with life, rather than making them cry by showing how naive they are and using that weaknesses of them to make you stand out.
All of us are bound to commit mistakes sometimes, and it's just okay since it's part of the learning process. But using it to make fun of others will just make you a devil. It will not help you to rise up but rather drag you down.
Bad karma is everywhere when you did something evil, and it will soon hinder you to achieve success. But when you are always doing the right thing, then definitely, good karma is on your way.
Be careful who you are making fun of with. You don't know if you're the next one who will repeat the same mistakes he/she did.
Author's Note:
There are really a lot of people just like you classmate before. We can't make them leave but we have the choice to avoid them.