"I Have Never Done a Single Bad Thing in My Life"
The Book of Balance, part 5.2 (Accountability)
I would like to offer something up today, because this thought has been roiling around in my head for the better part of this year and I’d like it to live elsewhere:
Disclaimer: when I refer to “man” in this next quote, I am talking about mankind as a whole, but I am, yes, also talking to some degree about men specifically. You may need to hold a little nuance for this, because all people are capable of this, but statistically, most are straight white cis men:
The man who does not self-reflect presents himself as a man who has never done harm, nor has ever been wrong
Yet, many people wonder why this person comes across as completely disingenuous, shady, and even unlikeable at times. It seems, for some reason, people don’t like to view themselves as flawed, but here’s the weird and almost funny part…
No one is perfect.
“How dare you tell me I’m not perfect!”
That’s some version of the response I get whenever I try to hold up a mirror to someone that they don’t like looking into.
My former best friend (circa 2012) was an American with a severe history of mental illness in her family, who was massively coddled by her grandmother for being the only quasi-functional person in her family (everyone else was fully disabled). Not to be a couch psychiatrist, but it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if she fully had a narcissistic personality disorder. If you tried to ever give her literally any sort of feedback — like if she was mispronouncing a Finnish word or if you called her out in a lie (she was absolutely a pathological liar) — she would completely lose her shit, demonize you and scream at you, and then probably start spreading negative rumors about you, to boot. Stupid ones, that didn’t even make sense, a lot of the time. Once, an acquaintance of mine told me that, at some point, this girl was airing out her ex-husband’s mental health issues on Facebook and she commented that maybe it wasn’t nice to do that and she should not talk about someone else’s vulnerabilities publicly. Long story short, this former friend of ours started telling everyone that this acquaintance sent her death threats. Quite the leap, eh?
I can only imagine what she started saying about me in the end, but I also don’t care, because anyone of value would have known that she was full of shit, and anyone else didn’t know me enough for their opinions to make any difference in my life.
Now this is a pretty stark example of this type of person, which I want to use as an example of the extreme ends of this sort of unwillingness to self-reflect. However, what this usually looks like on the day-to-day is more akin to:
“You seem like someone who doesn’t self-reflect.”
and the response, that often comes extremely quickly…
“Well that doesn’t seem like me at all.”
The minute we feel accused, even gently — even kindly — our brains sprint to defend the version of ourselves we like best in our own heads… the one that doesn’t do anything wrong and who doesn’t think they need to do any aftercare for someone else. Being held accountable feels like an attack when we confuse “having done something wrong” with “being a bad person.”
They are not the same. That confusion, however, that fear wherein fault = failure, is exactly why so many people avoid self-reflection in the first place.
I’ve talked about accountability before…
If you need a refresher on that, here’s the full article, but the tl;dr is this simple statement I made about what accountability means:
[You] understand that the way you exist in this world has an effect on others and that effect might not always be positive, regardless of your intent
Here’s the thing, if you don’t ever ask yourself if you were the asshole in a situation, how will you ever know if you’re causing harm to others? Harm is not inherently vindictive. It is, especially amongst friends, often an accident.
Now, consider this reel on Instagram (sorry, couldn’t embed it).
Yeah, I’ve been that woman, unfortunately. The one who had a man, with all good intentions on his end — a man who surely thought he’d be giving me a good time — coerced me and took advantage of me. I said “no” multiple times. He didn’t register that seriously, though, just kept pushing until he got what he wanted. He was also cheating on someone at the time, but I suspect he didn’t bother much about that either. I know it wasn’t the first time, so it wasn’t even because I was somehow special.
If you don’t look at your actions from someone else’s perspective and consider them from someone else’s point of view, how likely are you to be objective about yourself? Especially if admitting things like this to yourself means you might potentially have to unpack questions like “am I a rapist?” Well, I get why most men don’t want to examine that, and I even more strongly get why most women desperately need men to.
So here’s the funny thing about pretending you’re perfect…
Remember how I said none of us are? Literally, none of us. Even Jesus himself lost his shit in a bazaar and had a moment of doubt. So are you all really telling me you’re better than Jesus!?
…REALLY!?
And no, I don’t believe in Jesus anymore, but he is often cited as an example of exemplary human behavior, and even he wasn’t portrayed as perfect. He was human.
This is such a strange thing about humanity, as far as I’m concerned, and one of the most illogical things about patriarchy, which is somewhat ironic considering that men are supposed to be “more logical” than women (according to …men?). Where, exactly, is the logic in pretending you’re perfect, when what you actually are is a messy little human?
Literally no person on earth is exempt from having hurt someone’s feelings, hurt someone literally (often by accident but sometimes not), and having done wrong, even with the best of intentions. Personally, as a child I kicked my brother in the shin with my rollerblades on. I pantsed a girl in grade 4 on a dare. And in 2005 I shamed my first love so badly that children now exist because of the fallout from that verbal assault. I’m the definition of a walking human mess and I’m okay with admitting that. I have caused a fair amount of harm in my life. I have been guilty of having abysmally ignorant perspectives on things that I maintained stupidly. I’m not afraid or ashamed of admitting those things. I just deal with the consequences because I’m not afraid of accountability.
Our cultural obsession with appearing flawless — especially among men, who are conditioned to see fault as failure — makes self-reflection feel like a threat rather than the strength it is. Yet the irony is that those who never admit to doing harm appear less trustworthy, not more. The expectation of perfection doesn’t make us better people; it just makes us dishonest ones.
Ergo, if you claim to be perfect, you are inherently suspicious. The man who insists he has done no harm is often the one most likely to have done it… not because he’s a worse person than anyone else, but because he’s terrified of admitting “fault.” But that person may also continue to do these harmful things because he doesn’t want to view himself as “bad” or “wrong” or “flawed” or “at fault.” When he makes up ways to justify those actions, by deflecting blame, gaslighting, etc., he is absolved of both guilt and having to “do anything about it.”
So how’d I become so chill with my own imperfections?
Remember that former friend I mentioned before? Well, the funny thing about her was that she was able to prove a theory I had, which is something I just figured out by — haha guess what — self-reflection.
If I own my faults, if I know my failings, if I see myself as objectively as possible, no one can ever hurt me with a thing I don’t want to know about myself
Take a moment to pause and think about that for a moment.
This former friend wrote me quite the slanderous email, wherein it was extremely obvious that she was trying to use things she knew about me to hurt me. She was actively trying to do vengeance damage — a trait she was obviously known for. She pulled some of my insecurities out of our old conversations and threw them in my face. I truly hope my response of, “Yeah… so?” threw her for a loop. It doesn’t hurt when you already know something about yourself. Her efforts to do damage were pitiable and laughable at the same time.
Yet, the most common reason a person feels insulted or offended is when an image of them is offered that does not align with what they see in themselves. But ultimately, what is it to be offended? Well, I think Steve Hughes says it best… nothing. Nothing happens when you are offended except that you are offended.
Not quite the end of the world everyone thinks it is… though if you have woken up with leprosy after being offended, do please tell me.
There is no more profound example of this than the one given by 8 Mile…
You might know the scene I’m talking about. Spoilers if you care about a movie that came out in the early 2000s, but it’s a movie starring Eminem about rap culture in the US.
At the end of the movie, B-Rabbit finally manages to slam dunk two freestylers and gets to the final round of the rap battle. There’s a beautiful moment in there, where his friend Cheddar Bob asks him if he’s afraid of all the things that his nemesis, Papa Doc, will say about him in the final round.
You can watch Marshall Mathers do some genuine fucking acting right there as you see realization wash over his face. It’s brilliant. What does Rabbit do in that last scene?
He owns. Fucking. EVERYTHING.
Here’s the quote:
This guy ain’t no motherfucking MC
I know everything he’s got to say against me
I am white, I am a fucking bum
I do live in a trailer with my mom
My boy Future is an Uncle Tom
I do got a dumb friend named Cheddar Bob
Who shoots himself in his leg with his own gun
I did get jumped by all six of you chumps
And Wink did fuck my girl
I’m still standing here screaming, ‘Fuck the Free World!’
Absolutely. Fucking. Beautiful.
He then of course goes on to diss Papa Doc for being disingenuous and a poser amongst the people he pretends to represent, but the true brilliance of what he’s done here is that he literally owns every single thing that Papa Doc could use against him, so when he passes the mic over, Papa Doc has… nothing. There are no words left to hurt him. His pride has already been destroyed, and guess what? He’s still there, still standing, still on stage quite literally flipping off everyone who wronged him throughout the film.
At the end of this scene, his friends want him to go out to party, but what does he do? He goes back to work, because he has finally accepted responsibility and accountability for himself. He has grown and become someone you have faith in by the end of the movie. It rules.
Perfection isn’t power, but self-reflection sure fucking is…
So here’s the whole point of this ramble:
It’s normal to be imperfect.
Seriously, that’s it. It’s okay to be wrong. It’s okay to mess up. It’s okay to be bad at something… so long as you own it and deal with it, and try to do right by whoever you harmed along the way. To quote myself:
It’s not about what you do, it’s about how you deal with the consequences
This is something I preach regularly and it’s something that I developed as a mantra for my beautiful, flawed, imperfect, and tragically now deceased adoptive son… a truth he was unable to fully absorb before the end. Someone who was so ravaged by abuse that he couldn’t even reconcile being loved when it finally happened. But the one thing that made him flourish, for a time? Was feeling like someone wasn’t judging him for who he was, what he’d done, and what the world made him into. He was given permission to be messy and still do his best, and he loved it.
I never cared that he did things wrong, made mistakes, or even occasionally broke promises. Doing wrong was often a sign of him trying, which was better than stasis. And that’s the key: effort. Attempts to self-reflect. Attempts to deal with the pain caused by admitting our own imperfections. Attempts to learn from mistakes and wrongdoing and do better. Learning what hurts and harms others and making efforts to not continue doing those things.
When we see effort, we give space for improvement, because we know change doesn’t happen overnight very often. When we know ourselves and know why we’re upset, but we say “hey I’m upset” and the person responsible responds with something along the lines of “well that’s your own fault, not mine,” what exactly does that do to make the situation better? Where is the teamwork, the community, the friendship, the partnership in there?
The important thing to know is that nobody heals or improves situations by pretending they are flawless and without critique. Truly good people recognize the harm they have done and seek to do better in the future.
Perfection should never be the goal, because you’ll always be disappointed. The goal would, more sensibly, be awareness. To see the perspectives, to hear the viewpoints, to examine yourself through both your own eyes and those of others… only then will you truly form lasting connections with people. But connection will never exist without honesty, and a part of honesty involves being honest with ourselves, too, and recognizing that no one is flawless.
Stay balanced, my friends ❤️🐻
Note from the Author: If you enjoyed this bit of writing, perhaps you might enjoy reading life stories set in a fictional world where patriarchy was abandoned and all of these morals about kindness and community are inherent parts of most societies. If that sounds interesting, please check out my novella series, The Vitmar Chronicles… a slice-of-life coming-of-age series that follows two brothers as they navigate life’s ups and downs.
Read the free sample here — Learn about the series here — Find it on Amazon (EU link, but you can find it in all countries), Google, Kobo, and the Draft2Digital Network! Volume II is out now!
