July 1st, 2023
The world lately has me feeling a kind of sick, and I’ve been having to remind myself of a lesson I learned early in sobriety.
When I got better, my first instinct was to help everyone else get better, too.
It’s not a bad instinct, but it’s a naïve one, and it will help you get your heart broken if that’s what you’re into.
I learned that you can do everything, but you can’t save anyone. You can’t fix them.
There are a lot of people being really gross right now. They’re saying mean things and doing bad things and they’re just giving real bad vibes.
There’s a part of me that goes: “Well, if I could simplify this, distill it, if I could just explain it all, then they would understand, and we could all get along.”
And then I remember the lesson.
I can’t fix a bad brain. I can’t fix a bad heart.
I want to try. The way I write my words, talk to people, treat them, I want to be able to change bad into good like turning an Easy-Bake Oven dial but that isn’t how it works.
Bad faith actors will ask: “Well, what makes something ‘good’ or ‘bad’?”
It’s easy.
Denying the existence of a person as they are is bad. Every person has the right to be. Bullying people — that is, attacking people who have less power than you or a group of people you belong to — is bad.
Punching is bad, sure, but punching down is worse; the next time you hear someone complain of cancel culture, remember that you are, in fact, hearing them say this, and look at the targets those people choose. Are they people in power? Or are they vulnerable people, or just people choosing to be their most true selves?
Discrimination is bad. Generalization is bad. Not knowing history is bad. Denying science and objective truth is bad.
Being cruel is bad. Putting money over people is bad. Putting money over nature is bad. Putting money over anything is bad. (Don’t look at me, Jesus said it.)
I can still write. I can still try to dig deep through the plastic baggie of words I keep in my pajama pants pocket to tell you how I feel and what I’ve learned through my life.
But the only way someone else’s bad changes into good is if that someone else decides to change it themselves.
It’s kind of sick. And it’s the people who fix themselves and share it who spread the idea that we can all be kinder, more understanding, a little better; or, at the very least, a little less bad.
The Den 