Why did you start lying to yourself?
Did it seem just that easy? To shift the blame?
To look on as the responsibility you should have taken for yourself was dished elsewhere?
It felt good. You avoided the judgement of others. You avoided being scolded. You avoided punishment, and the pressure to look at yourself and think, “yes, there is something wrong with the way you’re acting, and perhaps you need to change that attitude. Perhaps it stems from a broken, tainted perspective?”
It did make things easier though.
You didn’t have to set about defining a moral compass. ‘Morality’ was left at bay, to be picked up by your future self. Responsibility wasn’t for you yet.
Perhaps parents weren’t strong enough at enforcing rules and punishment? They didn’t want to deal with your tantrums or attitude, so they let you go.
Perhaps you found the temptation of avoiding criticism too alluring? Defining your identity as an ethically responsible being was just too much energy.
Perhaps you’d never been given the chance to secure any fundamental thoughts, ideas or skills, as all you’d ever known was anxiety, stress, frustration and confusion in a childhood or family that gave you none of the security a developing sense of identity requires?
Yeup. There are plenty of those people out there.
Years went by, and moral residue was malevolently disregarded as a sign of weakness or impracticality. Ethical development was placed aside as the incidents of blame and accusation could easily clear your conscience of any liability.
Don’t take the blame. Shift it elsewhere.
Insecurity slowly crept in. Self-doubt. Sneering in the face of adversity, denial was a sure way of subconsciously restraining any sense of wrong or fault in your perception of reality.
It was your reality. You could do whatever the fuck you wanted.
You looked on in jealousy as friends smiled and laughed around you, open about their flaws and failures. They understood at moments they fucked up. They understood we all have weaknesses and moments where we must say ‘I’m sorry’.
But you didn’t get it, or you realised you didn’t want to spend the energy committing to the introspective relief available.
And so you went about the rest of your life.
Unhappy.
