ACCOUNTABILITY

Letter 016 NEW

I Understand Why I Did It. That Doesn’t Make It Okay.

I got very good at explaining why people hurt me.

They were scared.

They were hurting.

They had been hurt before.

They didn't know how to communicate.

They were protecting themselves.

They loved me. They just didn't know how to love me well.

For a long time, I thought understanding someone was the same thing as forgiving what they did.

Eventually I learned something harder:

Understanding why someone hurt you doesn't make the hurt disappear.

And then, inconveniently, I had to apply that to myself.

Because I have explanations too.

I was scared.

I was hurting.

I had been hurt before.

Sometimes I was reacting to something happening in front of me.

Sometimes I was reacting to something that happened years earlier.

Sometimes I expected people to leave before they had even decided whether they were staying.

Sometimes I heard rejection in silence.

Sometimes I needed reassurance and asked for it in ways that didn't sound anything like asking.

Sometimes I made people responsible for proving things they had never broken.

I know why.

I understand that version of me better now than I ever did while I was being her.

That doesn't make everything she did okay.

There are people who met me while I was surviving things they knew nothing about.

And sometimes they got the consequences of something they didn't cause.

That's difficult to admit.

Because accountability gets uncomfortable when you can't make yourself the villain or the victim.

Sometimes you're neither.

Sometimes you're just a person who was hurt and then hurt somebody else.

The first part deserves compassion.

The second part still deserves accountability.

I can say I was struggling without pretending nobody else struggled because of me.

I can say I was triggered without making every reaction justified.

I can say someone hurt me first without turning it into permission to hurt the next person.

I can explain myself.

But I don't get to use the explanation as an eraser.

That's something other people taught me without meaning to.

I spent years wishing someone would say:

I understand why I did that.

And it still wasn't okay.

No defense.

No rewriting.

No making me prove that it hurt badly enough to count.

Just ownership.

Eventually I realized I wanted something from other people that I needed to become capable of giving too.

So this isn't a letter where I tell you that you misunderstood me.

It isn't a letter where I explain what I had been through until my behavior becomes reasonable.

And it isn't a letter where I punish myself forever because I didn't always handle pain gracefully.

It's simpler than that.

There are things I wish I had done differently.

There are conversations I wish I had handled better.

There are people I should have trusted more.

There are apologies I should have made sooner.

There were moments when I was wrong.

I know why.

I have compassion for the person I was when I did those things.

I'm still responsible for her.

Both can be true.

Maybe that's what accountability actually is.

Not hating the person you used to be.

Not pretending you didn't have reasons.

Not allowing those reasons to become excuses.

Just being willing to look at something you did and say:

I spent a long time learning that someone else's pain didn't excuse what they did to me.

Mine didn't excuse what I did to other people either.