There are a lot of things about being human that I do not understand. The older I get, the more comfortable I am with that.
But there are also things I do know. I know that none of us exists separately from everyone else. Relationship is not something we occasionally choose to enter. We are born into it, formed through it, and spend our lives affecting and being affected by other people, including people we barely know and people we will never meet.
Our lives depend every day on the work, knowledge, choices, creativity, generosity, carelessness, and care of people whose names we will never know. We inherit a world shaped by people who came before us, and whatever we do becomes some small part of the world other people will inherit after us.
We are all just fucking interconnected, whether we acknowledge it or not. Sometimes that is beautiful. Sometimes it is highly inconvenient. Usually it is both.
I have spent a lot of my life thinking about what that means and, more importantly, trying to live like I actually mean it. A lot of that work has happened through my spiritual life and in faith communities I have been part of for decades. The tradition I have lived in has given me a lot of opportunities to figure out what I actually value and then ask what those values require of me in real life.
It is easy to say people have worth. It is harder when the person in front of me is difficult, angry, or has hurt me. It is easy to talk about justice and responsibility when somebody else needs to change. It is harder when I am the one who has something to answer for. Community sounds lovely until being part of one requires me to care about somebody else’s needs when doing that is inconvenient.
We fail at this stuff all the time. Of course we do. I do. Communities are made of people, and people are complicated. I have never thought the failures make the values meaningless. If anything, that is often where we find out whether we actually mean what we say.
Some of the most important experiences of my spiritual life have also happened in recovery rooms and other spaces where I have experienced unconditional love. I did not have to earn it or beg for it. I did not have to prove that I was good enough or apologize for being human before I was allowed to receive it. I could show up angry, grieving, resentful, afraid, confused, ashamed, or very much not at my best, and there were still people who cared what happened to me.
That affected me profoundly. It did not mean nobody challenged me. Some of the people who have loved me most generously have also told me things I absolutely did not want to hear. The love was not dependent on pretending I was always right, and somehow that made it easier to look honestly at myself.
If admitting I was wrong did not threaten my entire worth or my place in relationship, I had a lot less reason to defend myself against every uncomfortable truth.
And because I know what that kind of love feels like, it hurts differently when I see people who seem never to have had it. People who learned that love depends on being useful or agreeable or successful or easy, or on hiding whatever parts of themselves they think might make somebody leave.
Once I had experienced something different, it became much harder for me to think about love only as romance or affection. Sometimes love is simply care and concern for another human being. It is taking seriously that their life matters. It is wanting good things for them even when they cannot give you anything in return, even when you disagree with them, and sometimes even when you cannot be close to them.
That changed the way I move through relationships. My own needs matter. My autonomy matters. My pain, my joy, my body, my choices and my life matter. They do not matter more just because they happen to be mine.
Other people’s needs do not make mine smaller, and mine do not make theirs smaller. Someone else can want something completely different from what I want without either of us becoming less important. We can understand the same experience differently. We can disappoint each other. Our needs can genuinely conflict.
Life is full of that. But I do not think every conflict has to turn into a contest over whose experience gets to count.
I am one of the people. That may be the simplest way I know to say something I have spent decades trying to understand. I am responsible for myself because my choices and my life are the only ones I can actually govern. I cannot be responsible for another person’s choices, recovery, feelings, behavior, or growth. But I am responsible to other people because I am already living in relationship to them. My choices do not happen in some sealed-off universe where only I experience the consequences.
That is true in intimate relationships, but it is much bigger than that. It is true in families and communities. It is true in the way we treat strangers. It is true in institutions. It is true in the things we create and consume and in our relationship with the natural world. It is true whether we pay attention to it or not.
I think accountability grows out of that. If someone tells me I hurt them, I want to be able to take that seriously without immediately deciding either that I am a terrible person or that they must be wrong. Maybe I did something I need to own. Maybe there is something I did not understand. Maybe we remember it differently. Maybe I disagree with part of what they are saying.
Most of the time, people and situations are a hell of a lot messier than a clean verdict.
I have a strong personal moral code, but I do not experience most of life as a simple division between right and wrong. Context matters. Power matters. What we knew at the time matters. Intent matters, although it does not erase impact. What happens after harm is named matters too.
I think a lot of shame starts when we turn “I did something wrong” into “there is something wrong with me.” Once admitting a mistake threatens your entire identity, it makes perfect sense that people get defensive.
I would rather have enough room to say I did something wrong. I can regret something. I can be embarrassed. I can apologize. I can make amends when possible and I can work on changing my behavior. I can also decide that somebody’s interpretation of me is not entirely accurate. None of that requires me to become ashamed of who I am.
And if I want that kind of room for myself, I have to leave room for other people too.
That does not make every behavior acceptable. Some things are unacceptable. Some people are not safe to remain close to. Some relationships need to end. Sometimes repair is not possible because one person has no interest in it.
I do not need to make another person smaller in order to take harm seriously.
That is one of the reasons compassion and accountability have always made sense together to me. I can care about someone and still think they were wrong. I can understand something about why a person behaves the way they do without turning that understanding into an excuse. I can hope someone’s life gets better and still believe they have things they need to answer for.
I can do the same thing with myself. This is also why I have such a hard time with big ideas that never become personal. I like theology and philosophy and questions about justice and power and the things institutions do to human beings. I think those conversations matter. But at some point, I need the idea to cost me something. I need it to change the way I actually behave.
Interconnection is a beautiful concept until somebody else’s needs are inconvenient. Inherent worth is easy until the person whose worth I am supposed to recognize has hurt me. Accountability sounds excellent until I am the one being asked to listen. Justice is much easier to discuss when I am thinking about institutions than when I am thinking about whatever power I have in a relationship with another person.
That is where the ideas become real. And that is part of what has been difficult for me about Jerry. He can think and write about theology, institutions, power, addiction, damage, masculinity, and the forces that shape people. He can be deeply perceptive about the things that have happened to him and the systems that helped form him.
What I have struggled to see is him turn that same attention toward himself, especially toward what his choices do to other people.
I do not say that because I think I always get this right. I absolutely do not. The point is not whether I fail. I know I fail. I fail more than I would like to admit.
What matters more to me is what I do when I realize it. Whether I let the inconsistency bother me. Whether I can stay in the room with something I do not particularly want to know about myself. Whether I still mean what I say when living it is inconvenient.
Everything that happened with Jerry made me question a great deal about what I thought I knew about him. Some things I thought I understood turned out to be incomplete. Some things were not happening in the way I thought they were.
But none of that made me stop knowing these larger things. I still know my life does not matter more because it is mine, and it does not matter less either. I still know that other people’s needs do not make mine smaller. I still know that being wrong does not make someone worthless, that accountability does not require shame, and that compassion does not require excusing harm.
I still know what it feels like to be loved without having to earn it, and I know how profoundly that can change a person. I still know that people affect one another in ways we may never completely understand. And I still know that relationship—messy, inconvenient, beautiful relationship—is where so much of the meaning in my life lives.
There is an enormous amount I do not understand and I am more than okay with that.
I know enough to keep trying to live as though I mean it.