Binaries

Disney wants you to believe people are good or bad. But that’s not true. The lucky thing about humans is that we are so complex and creatively made, constantly contradicting our truths and accidentally living out someone else’s reality. We’ve all consciously decided to do harm to someone else at some point, and so what sets us apart then? The criminal injustice system tells a lie about the effectiveness of punishing to right wrongs. We can’t punish people into transforming justice and repairing relationships, or moving on from painful things. To have your pain locked away is to not have dealt with it, to let it continue to loom over you. For the better part of my life I let my mental disorder warp my thinking into black or white. Maybe I let things be binary, and all the things that didn’t fit on either side fell through the cracks of my life. I can’t take back all the segmenting, fragmenting, and splitting. But I can live in the present, where I can actually control what’s happening and how my destiny unfolds. I think part of my destiny is telling my story with all the nuances included. I think people should know I’ve harmed, been harmed, and been complicit in harm. I think this is a part of the human experience, and we can’t deny our role in systems of oppression, domination, and exploitation. But then again my black or white thinking activates and I’m worried I’m a part of the problem if I’m not a part of the solution. How can I be a part of all of the world’s problems? How could anyone possibly ever be a part of all the solutions? I think I put too much pressure on myself to be a perfect high achieving human and when reality falls short, like when I struggle to get out of bed for the 90th consecutive day this winter, I feel inhuman. I feel I didn’t live up to a standard which nobody imposed, a standard I just materialized out of thin air to demean myself. I put too much responsibility in the hands of individual people who are just trying to survive. Mental illness, disability, poverty, racism-and yet we’re all expected to be the best? We’ve sacrificed world improvement for personal development. You aren’t a project to work on. You’re okay the way you are. Maybe I’m the first one to tell you this. That’s the way capitalism is engineered. They make money selling you the solution to your total inadequacy. Today I choose to accept it. Sometimes I’m great, and sometimes I’m not. It gives me one less thing to worry about to know I can exist somewhere in between the glamour and the horror.