Accountability

OK, here’s the thing. I don’t want to be accountable. Accountability sucks. It means you can’t blame anyone or anything else for yourself. For your experience. For your mistakes. For your suffering.

Being accountable means you have to throw away the victim card. And let me tell you, that card comes in handy.

When I was in the 5th grade, I made a mistake. Honestly, I can’t even remember what it was. I made a mess in the classroom or something. I don’t know – something the teacher didn’t approve of. But she found the mess, and she called it out in class. And I kept my mouth sealed shut. I watched her peruse the eyes in the room, looking for guilt, seeking retribution. But I refused to admit fault. I was the teacher’s pet, after all. Admitting that kind of thing was consequential, and I wasn’t having any of it. Someone else could take the fall for all I cared.

And someone else did. And I never owned up to it.

My friend, Chris, who sat beside me, knew. And he didn’t let me off the hook. He made sure I knew exactly what I had done. I had let someone else take the blame for my bad choices. And it’s eaten me alive ever since.

The thing is, we all do this all day long. We redirect blame and ownership of our own attitude to other things. Our happiness is placed in the hands of others, of circumstances and events, and we, in turn, become victims to the world around us.

Most of the time, we can make a good argument. But they misunderstood me! I didn’t get my fair share! The odds were stacked against me! The gods were cruel to me! I deserve better! No one should have to go through this! You agree, don’t you? That it’s unjust? That I’m right and the world is wrong?

Everyone has a valid angle based on the criteria they are considering. No one can ever see everything at any given time, so we select the information we are evaluating, and we use that to come up with our excuses to feel good, or bad, or hostile, or validated.

I’ve been angry for a while. I didn’t even realize it, but it’s been coming out at the seams. I’ve wanted to blame someone, anyone, for the injustices I’ve been feeling. After all, I’ve got a good argument. Life’s been pretty unkind. I’ve got a whole lot of bullet points to back it up.

Oh, but here’s the other thing. The other thing that is hard to swallow. The other thing that, if I could just internalize it enough, would save me from a lifetime of suffering.

I am accountable for all of it.

No, not necessarily the circumstances of my life. The “stuff” around me. I’m not responsible for Violet’s cancer, for example. Or for other people’s points of view. Or for the seeming injustices in the world. The violence and greed. The ignorance. The losses and tragedies and sad stories that are out there, everywhere. For me, it seems that so many of them are right on my doorstep, banging away while I try to muffle my ears in my hands.

But there is “stuff” everywhere, all the time. There are tragedies across the globe that don’t even enter my observable world. And I don’t feel responsible for those. Not to acknowledge them, or ache over them. Because I can’t hear them, I don’t have to try to ignore them.

But the stuff that matters to me – the stuff that’s “in my face”, on my Facebook reel or in conversations or on cancer campaigns on billboards – feels like it is something I have to feel a certain way about. I’m justified to suffer over it. I need to be angry about it. Because how dare the world deliver that kind of shit. How dare the world be that unfair.

The world doesn’t owe us anything. And we don’t owe anything to the world. Not to other people. Not even to ourselves. It isn’t that kind of place, and I am learning that more and more as I go. This is not a transactional universe. It is a place of experimentation and exploration and choice. And the choice is always, how am I choosing to look at this? What am I choosing to do with what I’ve got?

When I was in the hospital, I knew this. I had to know this. I could no longer live by the principle that if I just had a big enough fit, somebody would fix something. If I argued enough for the injustice of things, the right people would agree and figure it out. Some knight of some kind would show up, armor and all, and make things right. I had finally found myself in a situation in life that wasn’t going to necessarily end in a picturesque sunset.

Right now, I have a lot of intimacy with the unimaginable. But despite all of this, I keep getting reminders that there is no universal way to look at things. There is no requirement to let disaster dictate how we see the world and how we live in it. It is normal and natural to feel pain and anger and grief when confronted with loss and catastrophe, but at the end of the day, our trauma is ours. Acknowledging the space that exists, however small, between the thing and our reaction to the thing is so life giving. When we can see that our power is in that space – that neutral place where we get to decide how we are going to see things and what we are going to focus on – we become enlightened.

That space has been very small for me lately. I’ve tried to embrace this phase of my “journey” – this unravelling that has come in the weeks preceding Violet’s end of treatment. I have let the momentum and weight of confronting my demons – finally reflecting on everything that I was unable to process at the time – run me over a bit. But I see it. I see that tiny, open, pure space between the darkness and the light.

It's a place of non-judgment. A place of total acceptance. A place of love. A place of not needing anything to be different. It’s there. It’s always there. And it grows on its own if you let it.

There are loved ones around me that are suffering. There are some that have had such significant losses that it seems almost ridiculous to acknowledge. The injustice is so big that it’s almost impossible to see the light. But I want to badly to tell them that it’s there. That the space will expand, slowly, eventually, until there is room to breathe again. Until they can remember that, at the end of the day, we do have the power to see things differently.

We are all accountable for ourselves. This should never be an excuse to hold ourselves to “blame”. That is the second arrow - the arrow that shoots us again in the heart, unnecessarily. There are no “shoulds”. There is only the understanding that no one and nothing else is responsible for how we feel. Everything is merely an excuse. Some excuses are just really damn compelling.

I have found an unexpected amount of space today. Like something has opened up. Anger and resentment I have been holding onto has dissipated. Blame that I have been holding onto seems easier to let go. The need for things to change in any way, or for me to explain myself, seems unnecessary in order for me to put a smile on my face.

Maybe it was the battle I had with Violet as she was leaving for school. She had a fit over not getting her way. This has become a significant problem since the end of our admissions. After all, she has been a “victim” for so long. I’ve treated her like one, so what do I expect? How dare I not give her what she wants. She deserves the world, after all. But we need to find a way back into the world again that doesn’t placate all of our immediate desires. The universe doesn’t owe her anything, either, no matter what hand she’s been dealt.

We are all fighting our own battles, wishing the world was different, wanting others to change or circumstances to change so we can feel better. But we just don’t have control over that. Accountability sucks, but in the end, it’s all we’ve got. We can be bitter or we can be brave and confront life’s truths with courage and confidence and compassion.

I’m tired of trying to litigate with the universe – to find the right argument and the right side. I just want to love today. To be in that place where everything is as it should be, even if it seems askew. It’s all heading someplace else, anyway. We are all headed someplace else. But we are where we are. Right now. In that tiny little space between the stuff.