This week’s subject is something I have been meaning to discuss here for a while. The subject matter is something I have learned that has wound up being tremendously valuable to me and has turned my entire world view on its head. I have been avoiding talking about this until now because in order to get to the meat of it, I must share a terrible story from my personal life and a lot of my readers are people who care for me immeasurably and I know that for some, reading this story is likely going to cause them as much pain as it has caused me. There are ways, of course, for me to make my point without telling the story, and I have considered that option several times, but I keep making up my mind to tell the story anyway because I cannot help but feel as though my point will not have the same impact needs without the background that led to my conclusion. I also have many other thoughts and ideas that branch off this one that I wish to discuss in the future, but it is important that I lay the foundation of this series of thoughts before I move forward with the other veins attached. With that being said, the following story is traumatic, heavy, and triggering, and I advise you to read at your own discretion.

When I was in my early 20’s, I went to a birthday party. There was a man there who I had met through the host a couple of times prior, but he was not someone I knew well. He was much larger than me and it only takes a glance to know he spends ample time in the gym. He is the kind of person who seems strong and confident – until you get to know him. In fact, it only takes a few short minutes of enduring the surround sound of his voice and hearing his endless negative and controversial commentary to realize that his being is entirely a charade intended to make you believe in his strength in order to mask his weaknesses.

As the party dwindled to an end, him and I were the only two that remained awake – or present. We were talking meaninglessly on the couch for a while before he made an advancement, one that I did not reciprocate. It started small, but his personality was persistent and my simple task of saying “no” turned into me having to physically create distance between us which then escalated to me continuously having to redress myself with the clothing he had removed. Then, I stopped being able to defend myself at all. Later in counselling, it was described to me as the third stress reaction that accompanies the fight or flight response that is talked about far more seldom, and that is paralysis. I have to say, of the three reactions that are available for us to have, this is my least favorite. It is indescribably helpless, and it is god damn terrifying. I am not exaggerating when I say I could not move. I could not bring myself to speak or even make a sound. Hell, I could barely even breathe. In my mind, I was screaming. My blood was hot, and the shouting in my head was begging me to do something, but I absolutely could not. I was frozen and all I was able to do was wait for it to end. The feeling is out-of-body. It is like you are floating while being simultaneously anchored to the earth. It is frustrating, because it feels like you should be able to do all the things you are ordering yourself to, but you just… can’t. I was frozen in time waiting to thaw but time itself had slowed nearly to a still. It is the closest I had ever felt to being trapped in a nightmare while being completely lucid and present. I would have much preferred either fight or flight in that moment.

After the horrific events that surrounded my paralysis came to a close, that guy made some kind of classic remark like, “how was that” or whatever, I can not remember. I was still frozen, and I could not regurgitate a response of any kind. A full minute must have gone by before he tried to engage with me again. He said my name, and I could hear the question mark tacked onto the end of it. Still, I could not speak. Then, I watched helplessly and silently as he got dressed and hurried out the front door without saying another word. I did not thaw until long after he was gone.

This memory tormented me for a long time after – of course it did, but more than the event itself, what bothered me the most were those final few moments watching him hurry to leave. That haunted me. How could a person be capable of that? I delve endlessly into the confusion of making sense of his actions in that moment, and the longer I dwelt, the more maddened I became.

About a year later while I was driving home from work, an epiphany struck me. I do not remember the trail of thoughts that led me to it, as I know that neither he nor the party were at the forefront of my mind at the moment, but I know that I was quickly able to apply it to that situation soon after that epiphany struck.

We rarely ever view ourselves as the bad guy – in any situation, regardless of its severity. I started asking “why?”, digging deeper into this thought. We are able to recognize right from wrong but seeing wrong from right is often far easier when we have a bird’s eye view of a situation than it is when we are trapped in the middle of it. Oftentimes, we can believe the lies we tell other people and totally accept them as truth, even in small, mundane circumstances.

This is when I asked myself a question that ultimately changed everything for me.

“What if we unintentionally skew our own memories of an event when we have done something wrong?”

Asking this question was a breakthrough for me. It felt as though I had seen the world in 2D all my life and suddenly, in that instant, the world around me became three dimensional.

With very few exceptions, we all want to be good. We do not have the desire to cause harm to people and in extreme cases, we do not want to even be aware of the kinds of awful things we are capable of. When it happens that we do something wrong, we are often defensive. We are prone to tell little white lies to protect our reputation and we are rigid and insistent in our position. This plays a huge role in how you can get two entirely different stories for one event. From an outside perspective, it is easy to be frustrated when someone is hesitant to be honest, but we have all been on the inside too, and when we are the ones who have done wrong, we are often just as hesitant with our honesty even though we are not often aware of it.

I applied this stream of thoughts to him. For so long, it had bothered me so intensely and so deeply that he was able to quietly walk away from me when I was clearly too afraid to speak and too traumatized to move, but this revelation made me think: what if he had no idea that he had done anything wrong?

I know that sounds ludicrous. From the story I told, the situation appears clear-cut. I had said no multiple times, I had moved myself away from him and removed his hands from my body multiple times, I had redressed myself multiple times. From that alone, the conclusion drawn from my intentions would seem apparent. Besides that, how strong of a sense of togetherness and equal participation can you feel when the body you are naked on top of is less animated than a sack of potatoes? Then, after all is said and done, you try to talk to them, and they do not respond, their body is stiff, and you just… leave? Would that not give you an indication that something is wrong? From my perspective, any way you dissect the situation, it seems morbid, disgusting, and messed up.

Still, I played the devil’s advocate long enough to apply my new way of thinking. It was gut-wrenching and difficult to dive into, but I had developed a strong need to understand.

Before I get into my journey through what might have been his perspective, I need you to know this: this process of thoughts does not excuse his actions. I am in no way justifying his behavior and I am not saying this shift in perspective makes what happened okay or dismissible. I needed to understand and sometimes, in order to do that, things must be framed in a way that is not always dignified or honorable. Anyway, here we go…

He has a strong personality. His presence is loud, and he has shaped himself into being a brick wall. I believe that it is a defence mechanism and that the way he carries himself is not an accurate representation of who he would be if he found a satisfying balance in his mental wellness. I think that in the process of building himself up to be impenetrable, he calloused the parts of him that would be sensitive to the emotions of other people, and I think he has more or less disabled the function in him that would allow him to read the room. He has a strong personality, but not in the sense that would make him bold or brave. I believe that subliminally, he believes that if he is aggressive, confrontational, and controversial, he is setting up a line of defence against ridicule or heartache before it even has a chance of existing. I think that because of the way he hardened himself, he made himself only able to hear people like him. I think that if my personality type were more akin to his, I would have come across more aggressively when I said no, and he would have heard me.

Now, I do not believe that even that situation would have gone well. I think he would have been deflective and that it would have likely ended with him calling me a bitch, but in that circumstance, I do think that it would have ended.

This is not to say I should have done more or that I am to blame for what happened. I did all I could given my set of strengths and abilities. This is only to say that I do not believe this calloused version of him is receptive to me.

For whom I am as a person, I am soft-spoken and polite. I don not like to be intrusive and I am in a constant state of concern for the well being of those around me, to the point where it is hyperactive and arguably unhealthy. All these things are even more true and more prominent the unhappier I am, and during the time of that horrible occurrence with him, there were other circumstances going on in my life that had nearly completely depleted my happiness. Along with all of this, even when I am at my highest level of anger, frustration, confidence, or fear, I still come across… sparkly. Even when I am intensely firm on a position and I need to “lay down the line,” I do not come across the same way, say, Al Pacino would – even if that is how I feel in my bones.

I think that with the combination of my personality and his ability to process information, my pleas to stop did not register. I think that if anything, he perceived my fear, discomfort, and insistence as playful. I think that the moment I stopped being able to defend myself, he thought he was granted permission to proceed. I think that from then on, reality distorted in real time for him to match his agenda. My stillness and lack of reciprocating may have come across as timidness, matching his already developed view of my person. If in his head, everything up to this point seemed okay, then my inability to respond to him in the end would have just seemed strange. Not necessarily wrong or off-putting, just… weird, and it is natural to walk away from weirdness. It is reasonable not to pry when someone is not engaging with you if there seems to be no reason for it.

This opened a whole new slew of thoughts. I had spent a year, at least, being immensely afraid of this man. I had spent a year, at least, feeling sick, disturbed, and repulsed by what he had done to me. All the while, I had realized, he might not have the faintest idea of what he had put me through, and what I had been experiencing as a result ever since. It was like that whole time, we had been living in different but parallel timelines and suddenly, through an abrupt stream of thoughts, I had found a line to connect our timelines back together.

This, of course, was all just a theory and having it sit as just a theory was not enough for me. In fact, I can almost say that it left me more perplexed than if I had not fallen down that trail of thoughts at all. I needed to talk to him.

I wrote him out a private message on social media when I got home. The way I wrote out my message was dictated by the way I had formulated my theory. I realized that if he did not know what had happened from my landscape of things, there was a high likelihood of him being defensive if I was accusatory. I wanted a clearer picture; my objective was to know if I were right in wondering whether we unknowingly warp the truth in our heads in order to keep believing that we are good people, and in order to get that answer, I needed to phrase what I had to say in a way that I thought he would be receptive to. I began the message by saying I needed to talk to him about something that had been weighing on me for a long time. I told him I was terrified to speak about it and that I felt I was putting myself in a vulnerable position. I warned him that it would not be easy for him to read and I pleaded with him to be patient and understanding with me. Then, I put him in my shoes, and I told him what had happened from my perspective, repeating to him that I did not give him consent and I did not want it to happen. I told him how I had been affected and I detailed some of the ways I had already been trying to heal.

It was tremendously difficult to write, and it was even harder to work up the courage to hit send. Somehow, seeking evidence for my theory became important enough for me to follow through, and I got more than what I had bargained for.

The very first thing he said was that he had no memory of me ever saying no. He said he truly thought I wanted to. I believed him. Even though my memory of that night was still vibrantly vivid, as it had been haunting me ever since, I believed him – because we all want to be good people. We are more likely to bury the memories that confront our morality than we are to face them, and that is what I believed happened with him. If he remembered that I had said no, repeatedly, with actions consistent with my words, then he would have to make himself aware that he did something horrible.

If he said he did not hear me say no, I would have been more skeptical. In fact, that might have shattered me and fractured my faith in humanity.

I did not believe him just because I wanted to, either. I entirely believe that he truly meant it when he said he did not remember me saying no. After all, for who he is already, he is prone to abusing defence mechanisms. He is entirely made up of a version of himself equipped to protect him, so much so that I think he has lost nearly all of what would make up of him if he removed the shell. He buried his memories to justify his actions, and I do not believe that it was intentional.

More than just that, I was able to reach him. He heard me and he listened to me. He did not grow stubborn, and he did not try any tactics to remove my voice. Instead, he apologized. Profusely. He made me aware that he felt horrible after recognizing what I had endured, and he even opened up to advice from me to help prevent himself from inflicting that same kind of hurt onto others in the future. He became ready to acknowledge the faults in his character that led him to create the circumstance with me. That is how I got more than what I had bargained for.

That is how a random spiral of thoughts granted me the opportunity to make leaps towards healing. A thought helped me to provoke a conversation, and it helped me to present myself in a way that disarmed his natural defensive tendency. Now, that was not a magic eraser that healed me entirely. Telling this story again was difficult, and even putting myself in his shoes again to explain the thought process to you made me nauseous, but I left that conversation feeling a lot lighter. I no longer had to be afraid of him, or tortured by the memory of him walking away playing in a loop in my head. I understood him and that led him to understand me, making me able to mend our timelines back into one, linear piece.

I am not recommending that you follow my footsteps and handle situations in your own life this way, especially if the conditions are as extreme. Hell, there are even other circumstances in my own life that have been just as painful for that I would not handle in this same fashion, but in the case with him, I am glad I handled it the way I did.

I learned a lot more than I was expecting to. Learning that we can absentmindedly lie to ourselves and accept those lies fully as truth changed how I digested information and experiences going forward. It made my opinions on redemption greyer, and that is still something I am continuously sorting through, but it also helped me to navigate better ways to wholesome and satisfactory conclusions. Understanding that people might not be aware of their wrong doings changed how I approached circumstances that called for confrontation. I found being empathetic was far more valuable than I had ever known before when I discovered that being empathetic to a false version of a story can sometimes be the shortest path to unearthing the truth. I learned that I do not believe that empathy is reserved for the deserving and that sometimes, finding peace means wearing uncomfortable shoes. Being human means continuously learning that right and wrong is difficult to scrutinize. Recognizing the difference between right and wrong only comes easily when we can see the full picture. Our moral compass is not as reliable as it seems. It is most likely to point North when we are not held accountable in the situation, but the more heavily we are involved, the more likely the needle will break, leading us further and further away from righteousness.

Through my own journey of learning how blurry and opaque circumstances can become on a broader scale than just this story, I recognize the importance of not dismissing or disregarding people for their behavior. Had I not considered that even in such a black and white, cut and dry situation such as my own that there could be some grey matter, I would have terminated my own opportunity to have such a grand development in my healing process just by blocking out alternative information. Who knows how much further behind I could have been had I not allowed myself to be receptive to the idea that an evil deed may not be indicative of an evil person?

This does not mean I am dismissive of accountability. Having a broader understanding of a situation does not make the situation more justifiable, but it does change the impact and the result; it charts a much different path to a conclusion.

The reason I have been wanting to talk about this so badly is because this tiny thought that I had, considered, developed, and stirred in has made me wonder how much excess fat we carry by being eager to label a person as damaged goods without a second thought. Right, because we often talk about people who have done horribly wrong things like they should not be given a second thought, but that is very rarely actually exercised. The truth is that when we dismiss someone as vulgar, dangerous, corrupt, or savage, even when they are deserving of it, we rarely abide by our opinion of not giving it a second thought. I think that we are keen to assessing horrible deeds as a trait that encompasses the person because we fear that attempting to understand them instead will offer them redemption when we do not find them worthy. We think that by assuming their actions are their identity, we are treating them in a way that they deserve, and that by dismissing them as being human, we are removing our attachments to them and giving ourselves the ability to move forward. Usually, though, this fails to work. Deeming something to be true, even when the logic is sound, does not make it true. By reducing someone to their faults, we are never inclined to learn why their faults occurred in the first place. Instead of being able to forget about them and move on, the inability to understand their actions often manifests as anger for the pain they caused and grows like a thick, black mass inside of us. Horrible events will continue to bother us and by not understanding what made them happen, we are infusing the pain with confusion and doubt. When any negative emotion lingers within us for too long, whether it be guilt, anger, begrudging, or sadness, it eventually alters our character. It grows inside us until it eventually forces us to replace parts of our personality with defence mechanisms and that process can continue until our identity is completely washed out and we become unrecognizable. More dangerously, it becomes a game of tag because if a resident of anger or grief overstays its welcome long enough to bring you to the point of becoming a Frankenstein product of defence mechanisms, then you are also at the point of being equipped and capable of inflicting the kind of pain that had been thrown onto you in the first place. The cost of every piece of your shield is a fragment of your integrity. Understanding why horrible things occur is not for their redemption – it is for yours.

Let’s bring this back to my original point. We can warp reality in our memory to suit our need to preserve our self image, and we all do it. More often than not, we can not recognize when we do.

Have you ever accidentally told a tiny white lie? I mean, with zero intentions of lying, and maybe you did not even realize it was a lie when the words came out of your mouth. That is an example of this kind of self-preservation. Most of the need we have for our entire justice system stems from our impulse to self preserve. As a collective, we value the truth more than the need to believe in good but on an individual level, even if you are not coherently aware of it, the opposite is far more prevalent. On an individual level, we value the need to believe that we are good more than we do the truth. Having to be aware of the damage that we cause is painful and difficult to confront, that is why we are often inclined to distort our memories to suit our idea of who we are. This happens to all of us on occasion, and it happens whether we are complete, or we are calloused. If a calloused person is more likely and more capable of inflicting pain while still being reciprocal to having their memories distorted to believe they are good, then how many more calloused people are we creating by encouraging the instinct to reduce a person to their deed?

How many broken, parallel timelines have developed in your lifetime?

How many people have no idea how badly they hurt you as a result of their own distorted memory?

How many times have you dismissed an opportunity for yourself to heal because you deemed someone else unworthy of redemption?

The man who hurt me does not deserve to be unscathed after what he had done. He deserves to be confronted by the shame of his actions and the impact they created, but I deserve redemption. I deserve to heal from the pain he caused me and by understanding him, I allowed myself to take steps toward all that I deserve, and I was able to rid myself of the excess fat I was carrying.

Who knows… maybe I put a crack in his callous?