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Most people have heard the story of the scorpion and the frog.
A scorpion needs to cross a river and asks a frog to carry him. The frog hesitates, worried the scorpion will sting him. The scorpion promises he will not, because if he stings the frog, they will both drown.
So the frog agrees.
Halfway across, the scorpion stings him anyway. As they both go under, the frog asks why. The scorpion says he could not help it. It is his nature.
Most people hear that story and get upset with the scorpion. He gave his word and broke it. He doomed them both. The betrayal is the part that sticks with people, and I understand why.
But I look at it differently.
The scorpion did exactly what a scorpion does. He was a scorpion before he got on the frog’s back, in the middle of the river, and when they both went under. Nothing about him changed.
The frog knew.
That is the part I keep coming back to, because I have seen it show up in my own life more than I like to admit. With friends, coworkers, and the people I love, I have sometimes built my expectations around who I hoped they would be. I would take the person they were on their best day and treat that version as the one I could count on, even when the pattern in front of me said otherwise.
Then I would be surprised when the pattern repeated.
People will disappoint us. I eventually realized the answer was not to become bitter and expect the worst from everybody. It was to stop asking people to be someone they had not shown themselves to be.
Not who I hoped.
Not who they promised.
Who they are.
One of the people I love and respect most in this world is never on time. It does not matter what time you tell her. She is going to be late.
I have watched other people get broken by that. They throw up their hands and say they cannot deal with it. She is never where she is supposed to be.
But I have been on the other side of her lateness. She was late to somebody else because she was with me, giving me her time. The thing that frustrates one person is connected to the thing another person loves about her. What looks like a flaw from one side can have something golden hiding behind it.
She is not doing it on purpose. It is just how she is built. At work they give her a 10-minute window before she counts as late, and she has learned to live inside that buffer. Personal plans never come with one, so I build her one. If we are going to eat at 7:00, I tell her 6:30. She shows up at 6:45. Dinner starts on time. She may know the trick by now, but neither of us ruins dinner arguing over the clock. Some nights, whatever came before runs short, she is early, and we get more time to catch up before the reservation.
I plan around the pattern instead of demanding that this be the one night she becomes someone else.
Here is the part of the fable most people skip. The frog was not helpless. He knew what a scorpion was. He could have said no before they entered the water.
The sting was the scorpion’s doing.
The decision to carry him without a plan was the frog’s.
That does not let the scorpion off the hook. It says the frog had more power than he used. I have had to admit the same thing about myself. Much of the disappointment I have felt did not come from people hiding who they were. It came from people showing me exactly who they were and me deciding to believe something else.
This is also where I have to be careful with the lesson. “People are who they are” can become an easy excuse to label everyone a scorpion and cut them off.
That is not what I mean.
Real people are not scorpions, and a person’s pattern is not the whole person. Being late is not venom. Someone who forgets is not the same as someone who dodges me on purpose, and neither is the same as someone who overpromises and never delivers. I have learned that different problems do not deserve the same response.
I can love almost everything about a person and still be honest that one part of them keeps showing up. Loving the rest of them does not make that part disappear.
When a late dinner is all that is on the line, planning around who someone is costs me almost nothing. But the lesson gets more expensive as the stakes climb. The pattern I can laugh off over dinner may be the same pattern I cannot afford to ignore when something important depends on it.
I have learned not to build an entire crossing around someone who has shown me they may not carry their part. I leave another route when I can. I set a condition when I need one. I try to keep enough control to change course. I cannot prevent every sting, but I can keep one from taking me all the way under.
The frog’s mistake was not trusting the scorpion. The frog’s mistake was trusting the scorpion to be something other than a scorpion.
Sometimes the honest decision is still to make the crossing. I look at what a person brings into my life and what the relationship costs me. I try to count the part that comes bundled with who they are before I get in the water.
If the crossing is still worth it, I go.
But I go knowing where the sting is likely to land. I price it in. When it comes, it hurts, but it does not wreck me in the same way, because I did not build my safety around the hope that it would never come.
Acceptance is not surrender. Seeing somebody clearly has given me more room to protect myself and, when the relationship is worth it, still keep them close.
I have made peace with the fact that people will be people. It has not made me colder. If anything, it has made me easier to be around, because I stopped asking the people in my life to be someone they never were.
The scorpion was always going to be a scorpion. The lesson was never about him.
The frog knew.
The question was whether he was willing to see clearly before he stepped into the water.
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