Standing up for myself

This weekend, I was in Vegas for a bachelorette party and forced to deal with a perpetually bitchy girl who is a friend of the bride. I tried to make nice but she is not that nice.

I don't have a problem with assertive women, in fact I consider myself one. The bitch I refer to is not just assertive - She is aggressive and entitled and seems to think she is allowed to tell everyone how to do everything. What annoys me, is that this assumes she knows everything. She doesn't.

Saturday night, fueled by alcohol and probably a mixture of her desire to be in charge and her own insecurities, she verbally attacked me. I am actually not exaggerating when I say attack - she stood and pointed her finger and said a couple hundred words to me intended to hurt me and put me in my place. It was misguided and unprovoked.

My chest burned. I was stunned with embarrassment and anger and confusion about how to respond. The bride to be was sitting next to me and I kept her in mind, knowing that if I retaliated it would ruin her night. This was supposed to be her night.

I tried to stay calm. As soon as the initial lashing had passed, I waited and looked right at the bitch and told her she was out of line and misunderstood the situation. I felt good for a tiny moment - I'd stood up for myself (at least a little). But then her rant continued. I don't remember what she said really because Adrenalin was surging through my blood and my eyes were burning with impending tears. All I remember is thinking she was both wrong and mean.
Suddenly I felt I could not hold back the tears so I looked into my lap. Furiously picking at my fingers and staring at the pattern on my skirt, I watched thick, heavy tears drop onto it's fabric.

The bride-to-be jumped to my defense but it was already done. Why am I such a F*&^ing cry baby? I was just thinking the whole time - Why are you crying? Stop it. Stop it now!
As you may imagine, this strategy was not very effective. I did not want to cry and look weak. I did not want to distract from the bachelorette we were all there to celebrate.

Without embarking on a feel-sorry-for-myself jag, it is still stinging.

I did not and do not care what this particular person thinks of me. In fact, I actually felt great on some level that she acted like such a lunatic, because she proved what I'd thought about her all along. I was relieved to be right. But it still made my heart pound, my blood flush close to the surface, and the tears were unpreventable.

I am proud of the fact that I did not take her bait. I was graceful and "took the high road" as I have so often in the past struggled to do. I am however, still incredulous that I was spoken to that way. I always try to put myself in other people's shoes, but some women's behavior defies explanation. Some people are just bitches.

Because I am not a victim, I would now like to make a bitch of the top three biggest bitches I have encountered in my 30 - almost 31 years on the planet.

1) Jamie - the bitch from this weekend. To summarize, Jamie is a bitch because she thinks she is right all the time and because she feels entitled to tell everyone else what they are doing wrong constantly.
In a 36 hour period, she complained at least twice to a manager about service; talked over the entire movie Castaway, listing improbable scenarios and berating the characters on screen; With very little information, she made an assumption about me, chewed me out for something I did not do, and then refused to drop it immediately when confronted with the fact that she was wrong.

2) Jessica - the snarky assistant - what I bitch! Again, entitled. But also passive aggressive, vindictive and generally sullen. People at the office still mention what a horrendous bitch she was almost a year after her departure on an almost weekly basis.

3) Michelle - my roommate from SF. Michelle was mostly insecure I think. But she did think she was right about most everything. She was passive aggressive and undermining. I struggled with depression after losing my job and being mugged at gunpoint and she did the thing where she would be talking with our other roommate when I would walk in a room and as soon as I entered they would stop. One day I found an email she'd printed from her to her boyfriend about how I was a big crybaby. True, those post-traumatic stress tears were totally over the top.