When I was in High School, I took my best friends’ boyfriend from her.  This is a situation I never thought I would find myself in.  I wanted to believe, at the time, that I was better than that.  He and I had been talking on the phone, as friends.  I started to have feelings for him.  He told me that he had feelings for me.  I was going more on unrequited love, as I remember.  Part of me enjoyed the tragedy of the situation. This having hidden feelings.  This misfortune of fate, bringing us together through the mutual point of my best friend – whom nobody wanted to hurt.  Right? So much Romeo and Juliette. So much forbidden love.  I did not comprehend the disaster of which I was standing on the edge.  It felt safe between he and I.  The secret, I mean.  The secret felt safe.  I trusted that he felt the same way about this.

We had two phone lines back in those days.  One upstairs and one downstairs.  I remember the night she found out (oops, he so accidentally (on purpose) slipped up and mentioned it) because both phones started ringing simultaneously.  The fear in my heart and the sudden dryness in my mouth told me I’d been exposed.  I let both lines ring until they gave up. 

She confronted me at school the following day.  For reasons I still am unable to fully understand, she absorbed this.  She and I remained friends.  Time is the truth bearer in relationships that are built on the pain of others, though. In my opinion, she got the better end of the deal. She moved on and was in a better, kinder relationship when he turned on me six months later.

When you have reached 50 years old, what is the significance of something that happened to you in High School?  This is far from the most poignant example I can find of harming another person in my life.  It’s trite, really. A lesson learned so long ago.  I cite this incident for one reason.  In the aftermath of her confronting me at school. In the aftermath of – ok you can be with him. In the aftermath of getting what I wanted, I was alone.  I had people, but I was alone in what I had done.  There was nobody that told me way to go, you did the right thing, you’re so brave, she deserved it. It was a shitty thing to do and there was absolutely nobody to tell me it wasn’t exactly that.  One day amid this aftermath, I was walking out of school and was struck with a powerful moment of clarity.  I remember thinking – I would rather be hurt 100x over than to be the one to have done the hurting.

Lovely in theory, friends. Don’t we wish that life were this simple? The way a 17 year old would have seen it. A moment of clarity becomes only something you reflect on, at 50, when you are wishing you would have learned back then.   

There are some situations in which we end up harming out of self-preservation.  I come from a very religious family of wonderful people.  Myself and this religion, we did not have a good relationship.  I had tried to bend myself and fit in to the space provided for me.  My inner distress became deepened at each effort.  I was young.  Perhaps, had I been older, my results would have varied.  I’m unsure.  The social constraints of this religion, the position in which I had been placed, the destructive God image I had developed were harmful to me.  These things were largely behind the eating disorder I developed from age 14-18.  I rallied.  I went all gung-ho into the first part of my adult life submersed in this culture.  I hit my ‘dark night of the soul’ at age 22.  Then I was angry.  I was angry I had tried so hard to meet all those expectations of me, to what end?  To my ruin. To my destruction. My plan was to take a six-month break.   I would take it up again, at that time.  In the future, where all would be restored. Take up the burden of these expectations once more.  Sisyphus, endlessly pushing his boulder of expectations uphill.  Each time I went to do this, I would falter.  I would put it off.  I would, again, pick a point in the future. Repeat the above.  I remained estranged.    

Leaving my religion rained pain down upon many people, but none more so than my family; particularly my parents.   Almost 30 years have passed since my exodus.  The pain is still felt.  I harmed.  I knowingly harmed.  And yet, it was still a ‘grey area’ case – because I harmed for what I felt sure, at the time, was my own survival. 

We have all caused hurt and harm to others. That budding relationship you ended because you just didn’t have the feelings the other person had for you? In the story of their life, you hurt them. That friendship you faded from because it was sucking the life out of you? In this former friends story, you were but one more person who abandoned them. Your parents may have wanted you to follow along in the family business, but instead you followed your dreams of being a Music, Dance, Theater major. You knowingly harmed, but if you were to do it all over again, would you choose differently? To the peril of your own happiness. What would your life be like today if you had lived a life of never disappointing a person who loved you?

Life can bring us to places we never imagined.   You may find yourself in situations that you previously thought were morally black and white.   Situations that you silently judged another for, in your past.  At times, when it’s said and done, you may have ended up making the same decisions that person did.  The poetry of this phenomenon causes me to wonder if karma is an actual thing.  In these moments, you find yourself suddenly filled with empathy for that person you judged so harshly.  They have long since moved past.  You find yourself wishing you would have responded to them with more love than you did, at the time. 

I do see the poetry, when I look back upon my life.  I can see those times I sat in condemnation of another, and those exact circumstances came to visit me later.  I’ve made some of the same choices you did, friend.  In the end.   When I found myself in your circumstances, years after you’d told me.  Years after I feigned compassion, but had an imaginary argument with you in my head, in which I stunned you into silence with my bulls-eye points.  Would I have been drawn into the same circumstances years later, were it not for my silent condemnation of you?  Had I felt true compassion instead, would those circumstances have passed over me? 

While something like leaving a religion is judged harshly by some, it is called brave by others.  But what about when you find yourself in a situation where 100% of the people can agree you did something really shitty?  You, who were so paranoid of what people thought of you.  You, who hid so much of yourself.  You, who spent so much energy portraying an image that you were not-quite.  You, who maintained that you were such a good person.  What then?

It is humbling to admit that you have harmed someone, deeply.  Your false bravado. You find yourself suddenly stripped of fluffy morals that had made you feel superior, before.   You have not one friend to justify your actions. Nobody that will assure you your actions were heroic, or even justified.   You do have friends, however, who show you compassion.  It breaks your heart that you are still lovable to those who love you, despite whatever it is that you have done. 

Learn, my friend.  Learn compassion for others poor choices.  For their learning experiences.  For the symmetry in their life.  Their poetry.  We are all but a few steps away from causing harm to others and ourselves.  There is no believing otherwise, unless one refuses, in their mirage of self-righteousness.

Put your arms around those who have harmed others, who feel remorse for their harm.  The road is long and full of the depths of self-hatred.  Having been so distressingly reminded of this in my life, I go forward in more compassion than I found myself before.