Once while walking along a roadside in Rio de Janeiro, I saw something I wish I had not seen: a car flipped upside down, the man inside still buckled into his seat. I saw this from a far enough distance that it was difficult to tell whether the man was dead or alive. The rest of the scene was obscured by ambulances and a crowd several feet deep. I came to understand that something disturbing had taken place, and many members of this restless crowd were now suffering moral injury after witnessing it.
“Drunk driving,” a woman who spoke English told me. “The other car had children in it. He should not have lived.”
I was taken aback by the bluntness of her pronouncement, but I also found it persuasive. This man had done something selfish, and nihilistic, and violent – and now here he was, being helped out of his car by paramedics, while elsewhere innocents had paid the price for his thoughtlessness with their lives.
Years later, I was in an AA meeting during which a man who’d been fairly quiet in meetings before spoke with surprising candor. He couldn’t have been more than a decade older than me, and he wore a pair of wire-framed glasses that slid down the bridge of his nose as he held himself and shook. He was so glad for our company, so grateful for our understanding, so lucky that he had us, because he was convinced no Higher Power in its right mind would ever forgive him.
“When I was twenty, I was driving blackout and I drove right into a van. A dad driving his two kids home from school.” The man began crying. “I shouldn’t have survived.”
With a sinking feeling, I realized he meant this not because the wreck had been a bad one, but because he felt the moral arithmetic didn’t add up. If one drives drunk and robs others of their lives, one should be dead, or at the very least in prison. This belief has its adherents the world over. Indeed, I’d been one of them in Rio de Janeiro. But now, watching this man – whom I’d spent many evenings with, whom I’d made pleasant small talk with while brewing coffee and eating powdered donuts, whom I’d personally wished a happy birthday (belly button and sobriety) three years in a row – declare himself unlovable by any god, I felt differently. Surely he could be forgiven? Or maybe even find some way to forgive himself?
Maybe the loved ones of the family in the van felt differently. Maybe they didn’t.
*
When I was six years old, my parents hired a babysitter: an artsy senior at the local high school whom I wanted to impress. I put barrettes in my hair, pulled out my Tamagotchi, and laid out all my Beanie Babies in neat little rows, excited to give her the grand tour of my room. But once my parents left, she told me she needed to make a quick phone call. That phone call lasted nearly three hours, and she was sobbing by the end. She was breaking up with her boyfriend. I cried, too, wounded that she hadn’t even considered spending the evening with me. I never saw her again, though the strange pain and embarrassment of that evening would sometimes arrive and linger like a slow-moving cloud blocking the sun.
When I was twenty-five and broke, I decided I’d become a nanny. I put an ad out and got a response: a wealthy family with an adorable preschool-aged girl. I interviewed with them and was hired the next day. The girl and I got along swimmingly. She loved telling stories and building little “faerie forts” with sticks at the bases of trees, so we spent many picturesque afternoons walking the nature path behind the family’s house. This lasted for several months until the family moved to a new address: a spacious condo in the heart of the city with blue-gray walls and antiseptic light.
The girl’s room was much bigger, but she was unhappier. She grew: her vocabulary expanded, and with it her ability to level cutting insults at people. All the intelligence and imagination that had gone into building the faerie forts now went into complaining about other kids, about her mom and dad, and about me. I was stupid, she told me, and I ought to shut up. The clothes I wore looked crazy. The way I talked sounded crazy. If I served her a snack she didn’t like, she screamed. If she liked it, she’d allow herself a single bite before pitching it on the floor.
I didn’t want to admit this to myself, but I was heartbroken. I’d grown to love this girl, and to look forward to the time we spent together. I didn’t understand what was going on in her life that made her behave this way. I didn’t know how to help her. I didn’t like being called stupid and crazy day after day, even if it was by a five-year-old. One day, I had a conscious thought I am not proud of: I will show her how it feels. She was screaming and telling me I was the worst person she’d ever met, so I threw myself on the floor of her bedroom and screamed and wept right along with her. Loudly and uncontrollably. She watched me coolly for a moment, and then her expression turned to fear. I saw this, realized what I’d done, and blubbered an apology to her like she was a friend I’d just emotionally unloaded on. A week later, the mother met me at a coffee shop far from the condo to give me my final paycheck. I never saw that girl again.
*
Those of you who’ve been reading my essays for a while know I once experienced something bizarre and wounding, something which I’m sure would qualify as “victimization” in whatever legal or financial sense you’d like to frame it.1 For a long time after the event, I felt ruined, and it seemed like the only recourse to future ruin was to focus on the inhuman cruelty of my antagonists. How unlike me they were, how deranged and delusional and stupid. How utterly authoritarian and depraved their cult-like operation was, and what a shit world it was, that these cretins could seriously upend my own life and the lives of many I knew and loved. I became obsessed with the damage of it all. I wrote about it in anger. I researched high-control groups in a fit of rage.
It felt too dramatic to admit that I wanted revenge, so the word I used was “justice.” Indeed, it felt as if justice was the only thing that would restore order to the chaos of my life. And with the bitter knowledge that I could never extract it directly from my antagonists, I decided to get my justice indirectly. I would smear the antagonists to the extent that I could. I would urge people to care about my suffering, ask them to bear witness.
Before this event – precisely a decade ago this year – I was so shocked by the state of the world that I knew nothing but a revolution would suffice. What was going on, I wondered, with these cretinous people who felt it made sense to carry out extrajudicial murders in the street – and in the name of the state? Were they born this way, or had they been brainwashed? What sort of republic was this, that these innocent citizens could not be kept safe from the violence of paramilitary maniacs? I was on the side of goodness and truth and protecting the innocent. I was not on the side of violence, and I felt so strongly about my convictions that I would have happily kneecapped any bootlicking authoritarians who disagreed with me.
A decade ago, I learned this: I was also part of the problem, because I was safe in ways others weren’t. My time was needed for strategy. My body was needed as a shield. This made perfect sense to me. I wanted to be good. I wanted to demonstrate that I was good. So I marched, and I chanted, and I gathered in circles around other marchers. And when it felt appropriate, I screamed.
Years later, I felt like the material benefits of all that unearned privilege had been stripped from me. My world was so devastated by the wounding event that I would have been completely insulted by the implication that I’d played any sort of part in it. No, I wasn’t “part of the problem” here: I was just someone who’d wanted to help, who’d welcomed a new friend (or three), and had then been viciously conned. It was I who was the good one, the hapless victim of evil forces. How reactionary would it be, to blame the victim for bringing violence upon herself?
The thing is, blame and injury can never be so neatly apportioned.
The thing about the Work – i.e. fomenting broad social change on an individual level – is it’s never actually done. There will never be a way that all highly entropic external conditions will perfectly match our internal visions of a good world. This is as true for the progressive agitator for social justice as it is for the evangelical Christian scrambling to “win souls for God.” I could march and donate and disrupt but never undo systemic harm, nor ensure that the correct politician did the correct thing, nor scrub my soul clean of privilege. The proselytizer can bring thousands of people to Jesus, but there’s no arithmetic that will allow him to claim that number against the lapse, nor against original sin, nor against his own sinning.
I never saw justice for the wounding event. By which I mean I never got revenge on my antagonists, by which I mean I stopped seeing them as antagonists and started seeing them as mirrors. Of myself, of the broader world. The only way forward from the thing was to try and learn something from it. It took me a long time, but I eventually learned that every player was as human as I am.
This doesn’t mean there wasn’t harm in the material and psychological senses. What it means is I kept being unable to fulfill this script: my victimhood would be acknowledged, and I would be compensated, and I would then live a good life. In fact, my victimhood was acknowledged left and right, by loved ones and readers and strangers alike; in fact, I did receive support. So why was I still not living a good life?
Imagine if the woman whose husband and children were killed by the man in my AA group had gone to his apartment and knocked on his door. Maybe she’d be so grief-wracked that she planned to threaten him, or to hurt him herself. And now imagine that the man opens the door and tells her what he told us in the meeting. Imagines he hugs his shoulders as he did then, and struggles not to weep.
What would she say then?
*
The thing about the Work is it’s never actually done.
Some of you might have wondered about this section from the essay I published last week:
You scroll, and it haunts you that other human beings could commit X or Y act. It’s scary to think of being on the receiving end of that act. It’s equally scary to think that it was committed by a fellow human. You feel you must ward against association with that individual and their ideologies; they are not to be understood and wrestled with, not to be seen as a mirror of something bigger, not to be learned from. No, they should be surveilled for, banished, and #resisted.
What I mean is that the endless project of correcting for injustices becomes just that – endless – unless we let ourselves learn something from it. Like the people doing these injustices are doing them in name of love and fear and fealty to a concept of goodness. These are all things we are deeply familiar with, but it’s the differences — whose life is and isn’t grievable, whose beliefs are and aren’t warranted, who is and isn’t victimized — that flood us with rage against them. That make them seem alien to us.
What I mean is that it’s easier to learn something new from all this than trying over and again to “correct” it. What I mean is that even if we were to knock grief-stricken and enraged on the doors of every alien-seeming antagonist and receive no weeping apology but callous laughter instead, that, too, could teach us.
I was the jilted kid and the horrible babysitter. Marching in those streets in 2016, I was either disruptor or disrupted depending on who was looking. If I demanded financial recompense for the wounding event from the wounder-mirrors, I wouldn’t get it. If I stood enraged on their doorsteps, odds are high I’d be met with callous laughter. They’d loved to remind me of my privilege, of what I owed to the less fortunate. In a way, they were right: if you look at the world as a set of material circumstances that must be correctly arranged, an equation to be solved, then I should have given them exactly what they wanted. It would have been unfair of me to make them extract it.
If you’re reading this, there may come a time for you when the world feels too big a thing to wrap your arms around. Maybe that time is now. Maybe you see how history – even very recent history – moves in cycles complete with recurring motifs. Or maybe you’re realizing that not even the clearest, most ardent admission of wrongdoing could ever render you unvictimized. Maybe you’ve begun to suspect that it’s you who can finally render yourself both unvictimized and forgiven. Who can let the good life sneak up on you. Who can start slowing down enough to see all the places where it already has.
When these things happen for you, I hope you’ll write to me. I want to hear all about it.
I don’t write about it in the terms I used to, but I do still enjoy this essay:
Raf, so many things resonate. “…every player was as human as I am.” Yes, we are multitudes, in that sense of high-dimensional, contradictory, time and circumstance influenced beings. I could be someone’s villain and another’s hero. I could be thought of as the worst and the best, all at the same time. While we might uphold certain values, as humans we struggle everyday to understand what they mean in practice. We fail and keep trying. As individuals we form collectives to shape our world, though our lifetimes are often too short to see what will emerge.
Really breathtaking insights.