Tin Man on a flag pole

I have seen a pattern over the course of my life that I started noticing in high school. This pattern has continued to this day and I am not exactly sure why. For some reason, people in my life feel complete freedom to verbally assault me whenever they feel that I need to learn a lesson. Its strange, really, but true.

Now normally these people are kind individuals who are generally gracious and good natured toward the average person. But like the Tin Man standing on a flag pole in the middle of a thunderstorm, I attract all kinds of verbal lightening. Now before you accuse me of a pity party, let me give you some examples.

A girl that I haven't talked to in 8 years emailed me two months ago. Her opening email was about two pages long single spaced. She managed to gently remind me about how "arrogant" I am. Not how "arrogant" I was or used to be. She somehow mustered the nerve to call me "presently" arrogant even though she hasn't seen me in years. Normally, she wouldn't say an unkind word to those around her. But she wrote this with the ease of a soldier writing home to his family.

I have had other such instances in college where various expletives would fly out of people's mouths who rarely, if ever, have a negative word towards another soul. But toward me, it seems, they feel a special freedom to "let'er rip!"

Now you must be assuming that I am a royal jerk in order for these unfortunate occurrences to happen to me. And I will be honest, I can be a real ass sometimes. But those who know me best are the least likely to have these fits of verbal diarrhea. The two characteristics that seem to be consistent over the years are that these people are girls who I am friends with but not extremely close with.

One such instance happened a few days ago. Apparently my sarcasm is deadly and deeply offends people. Because of this, I was kindly reminded that I was not good at loving people and need to work on that. This verbal attack continued for some time and just happened to be in front of 4 other leaders in our church.

Now, normally this person attacking my character and general ability to love has nothing but kind things to say to people. She is generally outgoing and pleasant with the world around her. But for some reason, the lighting came and it came with force. I make it a point not to attack back when this happens. Not because I am some holy saint of a person. More because when a verbal lashing happens in public, the person lashing out usually ends up looking like a fool. If I return the favor, I become the fool as well. And since I am already being degraded at the moment, I figure I don't need to add to people's poor impression of who I am.

I can say that I generally would not have the audacity to publicly assault someone verbally. I can't say that I would ever feel comfortable outright calling someone arrogant that I haven't seen for 8 years. I definitely wouldn't cuss someone out, at least not out loud, especially if they were a friend of mine. So why have these things happened to me on a consistent basis?

Does anyone else deal with this? Do people in your life feel like they can unload insults on you even though you don't return fire? It could just be me.