I Almost Killed Myself for Ethical Purity
Okay. Deep breath.
My most fervent wish since childhood has been to be Good. Not the way adults often tell children to “be good,” which actually means “be obedient.” Be on your best behavior. That was never my strong suit.
Instead, nearing adolescence, “being good” meant things like helping a kid gather their papers if they stumbled in the hall. Turning in lost wallets to an authority. Confronting the mean kids who picked on my friends.
Of course, I was plenty mean and petty myself when I felt insecure. Y’know, like kids are. (Okay, #NotAllKids. Maybe your kids are little angels who would never be mean to anyone.)
Somewhere around 12 or 13, I bloomed into my bisexuality —there weren’t label wars going on in my social sphere back then; bisexual was the only word we had— and broke away from the unaccepting LDS church for a brief stint as an angry gnostic atheist. In high school I thought I should give the church a real soul-searching try, at least until I graduated. I left for university as a sad agnostic atheist. Still no gender or genital restrictions on who I found attractive, though.
Also somewhere around 12 or 13, I began experiencing suicidal ideation.
And as I grew up, “being good” became ever more codified. Much as I hated just the idea of obedience, there were rules I accepted as the parameters of goodness. No drinking. No drugs. No coffee or tea. No swearing. No rated-R movies. Absolutely, definitely no sex. I was punk-adjacent, but straight-edge. Be Good.
It was never, ever good enough. Guilt and worry about how I hurt the people around me, along with other failures, became my most frequent companions.
I imagine most sincere progressives will understand the draw towards progressive politics for someone who cares about being good but is disillusioned with Christian religious authority. We’re probably in it for similar reasons.
We want to help people, especially the people who are hurting most. We want to fight injustice. We love animals and nature, and thus want to protect the planet. We’re the artists, the scientists, the intellectuals. That’s the image, right?
And for many people around my age, university or college was a time in our lives when we started to deepen our understanding of just how much people are hurting, and who they are, and why — especially when it comes to race, gender, and sexuality.
We follow all our good progressive friends into feminism, then intersectional feminism. We’re hungry to learn more. To do good.
To be good.
But if you’re someone like me, it’s never good enough. You’re not trying hard enough, not making enough of a difference. More infuriating, the people around you aren’t trying hard enough. They don’t care enough. They’re complacent. They’re complicit. They don’t care if living beings suffer to provide the things they enjoy.
Do I care enough? If I cared more, I would be doing more. Why aren’t I doing more? I’m part of the problem. I can never stop being part of the problem.
I can never do enough good to offset my harm. I’m broken. I take out my anger on the people around me. I consume too much and everything I consume involves someone or something suffering. I’m not doing shit to help the people who are less fortunate than me. I can’t change things enough.
I can’t do enough to justify my existence.
There’s only one way to stop doing harm.
At time of writing, it’s been a little under 10 years since that attempt. People can change a lot in 10 years, and I’ve done a lot of healing. It’s not all gone. I’m not certain if it ever will be.
Regardless, I don’t need the world to change to stop me from hurting myself. But I’ve had 10 years to slowly, sometimes halting, sometimes backsliding, slowly build the cognitive habits and stable, trusting relationships needed to keep me anchored enough.
Meanwhile, the most popular brand of progressivism in America, now exported abroad, has become more and more codified, like the religions many of us left. What does it take to be good? What does it take to do no harm? To not be complicit?
Check your privilege. Deal with your fragility. Don’t center yourself. Don’t ask anyone to do the emotional labor of considering your feelings. Avoid microaggressions. Always believe victims. Questioning or disagreeing is gaslighting. Educate yourself.
You are racist. You are sexist. You are homophobic and transphobic. You cannot help being any of these things because they are systemic and you are part of the system.
No matter what marginalized identity you have, you can have internalized hatred and use it to hurt others. Any marginalized identities you don’t have, you have power over and must be constantly vigilant to not punch down accidentally. Any hurt you cause to a marginalized person carries the weight of hundreds if not thousands of years of injustice and oppression. You can’t imagine the lifetime of hurts they’ve already endured.
Pretty quickly, you are going to see how many people are failing to get on board. How many shitty things they still do. All the privileged people claiming to be allies? They’re not doing enough. They don’t care enough. The traitors in our marginalized communities are even worse.
All around you are transgressors. Pretenders or outright enemies. Call them out. Everyone should know. They’re awful people. They deserve what’s coming to them. This is the only way we get the world to change.
But do you care enough? Are you doing enough? You could be doing more.
Should be doing more. What if you’re making mistakes?
What do you deserve?
Okay. Deep breath.
Here’s the thing. I don’t think all of our current social justice and progressive concepts are false or useless. There are still parts of it I agree with. I fully bought in until very, very recently.
Then I looked around and saw swathes of people on “my side” ripping each other to shreds at every turn. If your standard, well-meaning ally saw how people with non-normative genders and sexualities treated each other, they’d be alarmed. It’s not any better if you switch the axis to race.
But the scales really tipped when I caught myself believing something because “my side” believed it. I was trusting the people around me rather than doing my due diligence. When I did do the research, my opinion was out of alignment, and I knew if I said anything that my side would excoriate me. Especially the ones who hadn’t done any research themselves.
I think a lot of our rules and rhetoric speak to real issues. However, they’re poorly understood by many of the people using them now, and often inaccessible to the people we need to convince for progress.
Worst of all, there’s a self-destructive force in our movement that comes from the underlying zealotry. It’s puritanical. The need to accept that you are tainted by birth into the system, that you must walk the straight and narrow to do no harm, that you must constantly repent, even preemptively.
Everyone is watching, always, and because they are watching, you might hurt one of them. If anything you’re doing could cause a marginalized person pain, you must stop doing it immediately. Only a selfish, bigoted, bad person wouldn’t renounce what they’ve done and apologize, and those people must be ostracized and punished. That’s how we protect people.
That’s how we are good.
You might accuse me of unreasonably extrapolating my own dysfunctional scripts to other people. Careful, though. If you don’t have a mental illness, you have privilege and don’t understand my lived reality.
And I’m not straight, remember? My mother is a brown-skinned immigrant from a non-European country. I feel agender. Anything you say that hurts me can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion. (All of these things are true, by the way. The last line is flippant, but do you really think I couldn’t spin a narrative against you to the right crowd?)
But you’re right, I am extrapolating. I’m making both an experience-informed and academically-educated guess about the internal scripts running for people who are progressive and experiencing frequent distress.
There are a lot of them. Go ahead and look at the mental health stats for people in America right now. Look at the rise in suicides.
There are plenty of reasons for this strain: financial struggles, awareness of global suffering and the effects of climate change, loneliness. But also perfectionism and shame.
Perfectionism and shame are familiar bedfellows to many Christians. Even in non-Christian families, these stressors are now being beaten into young progressives, too, by mentors and peers.
You think, maybe, the demands for ethical purity in our spaces, and the viciousness with which we enforce them, might exacerbate perfectionism and shame? You think that might widen the cracks made by the stress of just surviving? Is it good for us to believe the well-being of the entire world rests on our every action?
What has it gained us? Has it actually made anyone safer?
And who might it cost us?
We need systemic overhauls to create a more humanitarian society. I believe that unequivocally. I also believe some of those overhauls include recognizing discrimination and prejudice based on immutable characteristics, and working to change people’s minds and hearts so that we have the public support necessary to change policy and maintain social cohesion.
Yes, I think the people inhabiting more “privileged” positions would benefit both themselves and everyone else by learning how to not take societal critiques personally.
But I also think current progressive rhetoric sucks at creating a unified front to actually accomplish change. In fact, I think it’s downright counterproductive.
Our hearts are in the right place. Our messaging sucks. Our outreach tactics suck. The way we treat each other often sucks. And when you’re fighting a culture war, a momentous effort to change hearts and minds, you absolutely need your messaging and educational techniques and community morale to Not Suck.
One of my favorite socially progressive educators sometimes reminds his viewers, for a bit of hope: “On a long enough timeline, the social progressive always wins.”
On a long enough timeline, we win. History has borne this out.
We might speed things up a little if we stop getting in our own way.
And we might do it with fewer casualties.
For a deeper look at the problems with our rhetoric, I highly recommend this piece by former progressive activist Sophia Burns:
Want something lighter and more positive? I have a sticker for you:
In the meantime, be kind to yourself.
