I have always actively chosen to continually give people the benefit of doubt. This isn’t a character trait I feel I need to change about myself, but it certainly has caused me some pain in my life.
What I mean is that I am always trying to put off judgments of those I encounter because I know that I will never truly have enough context to judge accurately who they are. The most I do, typically, is decide whether a given person is a positive force in my life and modify how much I hang out with them.
Take for instance my relationship with my biological father. He was completely missing in action for all of my childhood. It took my mother’s death for him to come around, when I was on the cusp of thirteen.
Now the situation is extremely messy, but what you need to know for my purposes here is that I came to resent him. But not for his absence, actually; I was perfectly content with my life with my step-father who raised me from six months old. It was how everything went down when my mother passed.
He came to her funeral with the intention of taking me back with him to Ohio, from Georgia. Now, I had been living with my brother and my step-father my entire life at that point, so from my perspective, he was coming in and killing my family in a way entirely separate from my mother’s demise.
Despite this, I got to know him in the years after my mother’s passing. I came to learn about his life, specifically, details regarding the nature of his falling out with my mother; mostly that he felt like she had been the one to cut him out. I empathize with him, but I cannot say this has been a good thing.
I was still the sufferer of so much, and directly by his actions, or mostly in his case, his inaction. Yet, I feel compelled to pity him.
I think that even the case of a seemingly totally good character trait, like patience in dealing with fellow humans, negative consequences can still arise. We have to then decide the limit of a good thing at the point which it does harm to the do-gooder. In my case, I ought to have a right to reserve certain resentments towards a person who legitimately warrants them, lest my heart gets trampled in giving my emotional health up for the sake of the good of this character trait.
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