It’s not your fault.
Is there a more compelling idea? As an animal seemingly most suited in any environment to blame something reflexively, if not instinctively. We’re terrified of getting blamed and ostracized. We can’t be held responsible for the things we say, do, or believe. Literally anything else was and is always the reason.
I think this habit is a sickness of consciousness. We didn’t ask to be born. Existence itself is the victimizer, therefore, anything that exists genuinely feels like “the reason” or an ongoing perfect excuse ready to be deployed into any unwelcome moment.
The more abstract and loose your language, the easier to iterate. “People,” “life,” “things,” “they,” “it is what it is.” The more familiar or culturally accepted your cliche, the easier it goes down in your audience. The easier you convince yourself of the wisdom, purpose, and factuality of your own pseudo-position.
For some reason, we can blame infinitely, and feel blamed infinitely, but redemption only needs to happen once. You’re the evil character in the movie or across the entire franchise? Just throw the emperor over the ledge once and we’ll get right to shedding a tear for you. Heaven is infinite, no? We, conveniently, outsource the obligation to forgive or be redeemed.
In sports, there’s always the next game or the next season, if you get fired, a lower stakes team or less popular region. The stakes are artificially high, but unless you’re an acutely unlucky player, almost never is it life or death. The ball bouncing wrong might result in an own goal. Millions of fans will be happy to blame you. Your intentions, training, perspective, or any millions of details about the physics and weather that speak to why a ball might go one place over another are summarily ignored. Why?
Your feelings aren’t your fault.
That’s what the fans say, just not out loud. How they feel about your place is their right! How dare you question or contradict or protest in this moment of your colossal failure that you, too, have feelings, and aren’t at fault. Just because it happened to be your foot doesn’t mean you weren’t trying to kick it elsewhere!
And no one is prepared to hear you. If you’re from Columbia back in 1994, when you returned home, they killed you.
You catch it? “They” didn’t kill you. A single person did. A single person with a grievance about money they didn’t even need. A single person involved with drug trafficking. That single person was never brought to justice, only experiencing a relatively mild headache of brief incarceration.
What do “we” learn from this? Nothing. I, at least, already know people die for nothing and no reason and are perfectly content excusing away their actions indefinitely. What does that do for how and whether I engage the world?
I’m big on trying to not be like “everyone” else. I spend a lot of time clocking patterns of thought, speech, and behavior, and consciously try to do “things” or “it” differently. Writing is part of it. You, probably, don’t write, let alone consistently. You don’t spend the time trying to sort your thoughts and look for pitfalls or patterns that could help you stay oriented. If you do write, you might not do it with the intention of trying to orient.
I write so I can distribute blame appropriately and locate the point at which it enters the chat. Once you know better, you’re to blame. Every explicit fascist and “ho-hum” fascist is to blame for Trump, death squads and concentration camps, and the precarity with which we have rested the system altogether. They, in literal violent protest, knew better. They know you’re not supposed to lie and be racist. They know there’s math and experts that do hard work to keep us safe and coherent. They know, even if they have broken stupid brains that can’t critically think, they know. And the last decade has been a campaign of trying to pretend otherwise.
You know you’re dumb, or lazy, or dishonest. You do know. I do not trust you when you tell me you don’t know, or when it takes the shape of asserting what you claim to know or want, but your actions don’t match. You make a lot of wishes, and don’t do the kind of work that renders them into what they involve in reality.
These feel like big swing statements, right? Except, it’s not that complicated. You want more time, but you don’t make time for anyone but work or things that feel like obligations, but in fact are choices. You say you’re lonely and want friends or a partner, but spend no time acting friendly or developing what you’d bring to the partnership. You want your feeling appeased. You don’t want to do the work.
My clients “want to stay sober,” but they don't want to keep a daily journal about how they’re feeling. They don’t want to speak up in group. They don’t want to put the order of operations together that builds a coherent budget, hours they need to work, timeline for getting their kids back, or opens a discussion with a boyfriend that is significantly more boy than friend. You don’t want to stay sober, you want to have it your chaotic, incoherent, entitled own way. You want your insecurities or sense of being overwhelmed painted over by a story of your effort instead of the consequences of a lack of it.
Post modern internet, we’ve never had the “lack of information” excuse. We don’t just know, we have a dozen deep dive evidence-flowing documentaries about every angle of any given issue. We know all the things inflicted upon us by our corrupted officials and acutely small-minded thinking. We know the bad guys. We know the dumb guys. We know the lazy guys. We know what we’d have to do to make it right. We’d rather do nothing, complain, and criticize those who continue inviting us to the real work.
