From my experience, it’s very satisfying to hurt someone that has hurt you.
I don’t want to be that person ever again.
That doesn’t mean being silent. It doesn’t mean accepting or condoning. It doesn’t mean ignoring. It doesn’t mean that I won’t or shouldn’t fight. It doesn’t mean I won’t defend myself or others.
It does mean it’s not perfect. It does mean I have no clear answers, responses, solutions. It means I have only questions.
But I don’t want to be the person who deliberately seeks to hurt anyone for any reason. I don’t want to be the person who gains joy or satisfaction from hurting anyone, even the worst among us.
That is not the person I want to be.
I looked in the mirror and faced that and I don’t ever want to be that person again.
It’s not a reflection on anyone else and their way through difficulty, sometimes we do just have to kick and scream until the darkness bleeds. Sometimes we do have to compromise our deepest held values and selves. Sometimes we have to sacrifice everything we want to be for a bigger gain.
And truly, I probably will have to compromise my own integrity in the future again too.
I don’t know.
But I’ll have to weigh it with myself. With who I know I want to strive to live up to. And so I’m naming it. The thing I don’t want to become.
This is just me thinking out loud, with the circles that surround me, because we all have to wrestle with these choices and make our own answers. Reconcile our own journeys. Its not an absolute thought or a conclusion of any kind. It’s a feeling my way through the murk.
I share, not because I think I’m right, I’m more lost and weighted with doubts than anything else, I share because other people’s sharing helps me. So maybe my sharing of the mess and the wading through can have value for someone else.
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I wrote this as a facebook status on January 23rd 2017. I am publishing it here so I can easily find it again as a reminder to myself, later.
creating art in the desert 