You know what I blame?
I blame my seventh-grade English teacher.
She handed us fresh and challenging books, journals, and poems and somehow convinced me that my feelings were valid and worth paying attention to, worth writing about because, you know, why not immortalize my life in writing at age 14.
I blame Anne Frank.
A kid hiding from the worst humanity had to offer, somehow still writing:“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
What the hell was I supposed to do with that as a teenager?
Read it once and move on?
No.
It got lodged somewhere inside me. Forever.
I blame Sunday school.
I blame church pews.
I blame the Golden Rule.
I blame the Beatitudes.
I blame every sermon about kindness and mercy and forgiveness.
I blame every adult who looked me in the eye and told me to treat people the way I wanted to be treated.
I blame the Fruits of the Spirit:
Love.
Joy.
Peace.
Patience.
Kindness.
Goodness.
Faithfulness.
Gentleness.
Self-control.
What a ridiculous list to hand a kid.
Because dammit. Once you believe those things matter? You spend the rest of your life trying to exude them, live them, be them, and all while looking for them in everyone.
And when they’re missing, it hurts. It’s confusing. Did they not get the same memo?
I blame karma, too.
Not because I know it’s real.
But because I liked the idea that goodness mattered.
That what we put into the world eventually finds its way back to us.
That cruelty wasn’t the winning strategy.
That decency counted for something. Everything. No, maybe that’s dignity.
And maybe most of all, I blame myself.
Because somewhere along the way I developed the deeply inconvenient habit of wanting to be a person of integrity.
Wanting my actions to match my words.
Wanting myself and all people to tell the truth.
Wanting me and everyone to own their mistakes.
Wanting me and them to care when we hurt someone.
What an exhausting way to move through the world.
Because the older I get, the more I discover there are so many people who missed the memo. Who avoid hard conversations. Who don’t put in the fucking work. Who don’t have a therapist. Who think they’re always right.
People who disappear instead of explaining.
People who say they care while acting like they don’t.
People who keep one foot in your life and one foot out the door.
People who want connection right up until connection requires truth and accountability.
People who ask for a lot. Like asking for understanding while offering very little of their own.
People who protect themselves from discomfort by refusing to acknowledge the discomfort they’ve created.
People who can see someone else’s hurt and still convince themselves they had nothing to do with it.
People who rewrite even your stories because the truth asks too much of them.
People who call it protecting their peace when what they’re really protecting is themselves from difficult conversations.
People who mistake avoidance for healing.
People who would rather quietly exit someone out of their life than sit across from them, have a hard but honest conversation, tell the truth, and repair the relationship.
People project and call it your problem, your fault. Because heaven forbid people own their own shit.
And every time I encounter any of these? I feel like some part of me is standing there arguing with Anne Frank and Jesus and my seventh-grade English teacher all at once.
Because they taught me to believe in goodness.
But reality kept introducing me to people who claim those values right up until those values cost them something.
And that cost? Affects more than them.
and that’s the part I still can’t reconcile.
How humanity can contain both the girl hiding in an attic who still believed in people and the people who walk away from or avoid difficult truths because facing them asks too much.
Maybe that’s the lifelong assignment.
Not learning whether people are good.
Not learning whether people are bad.
But figuring out how to keep your own heart from becoming either cynical or cruel.
To keep my own heart from breaking.
To keep choosing integrity even when others don’t.
To keep believing kindness matters even when kindness isn’t returned.
To keep telling the truth even when other people rewrite the story.
And how to keep your own moral compass pointed north, even after you’ve met enough people to make you question whether anyone else is actually even carrying one.
