1. You cannot say the phrase “You look nice today.” It just cannot come out of your body in a positive-sounding way, no matter how truthful it actually is.

2. No matter how much you try to be gracious, your physical response to receiving a compliment is to dismiss it entirely or to reveal some horrible information about yourself to counterbalance it. “You like my hair? I haven’t washed it in four days, I’m disgusting hahah!”

3. Sometimes you feel like nice-ness is just not your thing. Being the sweet person kind of feels like the itchy sweater that doesn’t quite fit — sometimes you try it on, but after a while it gets really hot and stifling so you tear it off by saying something bitchy and sarcastic.

4. When you are really nice, people tend to give you that brief flash of “Uhh, what is going on here, what do you want?” even though you’re just genuinely in a good mood and feel like being perky/zesty/friendly.

5. When you make 100 percent sincere comments online, people tend to take it in the worst way possible. (But you really did think “this was so adorable,” you were not being an asshole!)

6. You can cut people with the perfect insulting, but that skill is ruined because you are racked with guilt afterwards.

7. You simply don’t know how to function in sentimental environments because you may be touched on the inside but say and do inappropriate things to hide it. Like, you’ll spend a wedding making dicky comments about the place settings, while inside you’re melting with “oh my god true love how beautiful.”

8. Only your close friends and/or the people who manage to make it past your exterior know how kind and generous you can be. They sort of sifted through a layer of sarcastic jerk silt to find the nuggets of precious loyalty and friendship within.

9. You have a habit of calling your friends by horrible names or insulting them as a sign of affection, and often forget that not everyone takes “ew, thirst bucket, cover it uppp” on a bikini Facebook picture as the display of true love and trust that it is.

10. When you meet people at parties, you have a little talk with yourself like “Okay, you don’t know these people, don’t say anything weird or mildly insulting. Be cool.” But then you get a couple drinks in you and you’re out there making totally inappropriate jokes and doing the dougie in the middle of someone’s sentence.

11. Actual jerks, like the not being sarcastic ones, think that you’re buddy-buddy with them, but you actually can’t stand that they’re mean to the core.

12. You have a “grown-up” personality for things like meeting people’s parents or going on job interviews, and sometimes your voice changes like two whole octaves. You’re like Christian Bale slipping seamlessly into his role as a totally nice, sincere person.

13. Sometimes you struggle to admit that you cried during cornball movies, or to be real with people about your goals, your body rejects being that vulnerable even when you want to be.

14. When your friends are crying, you go into total “oh my god my precious baby mama’s here let me help at all costs” mode, but when you feel sad, the last thing you want to do is put that on someone. You’d rather go home and sob in your secret, concrete-sealed “Cry Chamber.”

15. You often think of mean things that you could do for no reason, but know that you could never actually go through on them. (But you think of them! You know what they are!)

16. No matter how much you get angry with someone — and you are definitely capable of getting into a biting back-and-forth when the occasion presents itself — you are always willing to forgive and move on. Your default setting is “let’s make up,” with a thin veneer of “combative reactionary.”

17. The closer you are to someone, the bitchier you can be to them for no reason. And they totally get it, and give you shit right back.

18. Sometimes you’ve been genuinely worried in relationships like “How do I let the sarcastic jerkiness present itself bit by bit so as not to scare them off, but still not keep it bottled within?” And each date is a little higher and higher on the “giving them shit” scale, until you are yourself once again, and you know they’re right, because they accept you for the human Blow Pop you are, where niceness is the gum, and bitchiness is the cherry shell.