Repentance of a Different Sort in Day to Day

Years went by when I hadn’t had the experience, education, immersion in other people’s experiences to understand what I was saying was wrong. There were times I questioned things, but I had a guiding hand to help me through the rough patches. My turning point came in April of 2001. I was 28. Not a spring chicken by any means, but also not old enough to really “get it.” That spring of learning should have happened in April 1992, but my mom’s deteriorating condition, subsequent suicide and my descent into the void for a solid 6 years kept me from learning.

The early writings of Einstein are being cited as the end-all-be-all of his personality. Forget the couple decades and the major events that impacted him. All that matters is that he wasn’t perfect. See, this is why we need to stop turning people into fucking icons, honestly. Every human is going to fuck up somewhere. And you’re going to have to figure out where you draw the line. But if you draw the line at things that were said two decades or even more, sometimes less, than their full life, then you’re going to have to drop a lot of people from your life.

I think my mistakes and stains have been erased, and I’m lucky. No one will ever know how far I’ve come from the selfish prick of a libertarian white woman feminist I was. Except me. And I try to atone for it every day.

Again, I’m not up on the forbidden words of the day, “stupid” and “crazy” still don’t matter to almost anyone I know, and no one I know, in real life. However, I see the injustices and I see how history created our shitty caste system. We are becoming everything we pretended to fight against for our short run of a democratic republic. We will be as much a democracy or republic as the Third Reich was a Socialist system. You can attach any name you want, but if your actions don’t follow through, you’re lying.

At the end of the day, I am not a bad person, now. I tried, back then, too. I failed more than I do now, though. Maybe in the end, people will look back and say I was more good than bad. Maybe not. Maybe some obscure thing I wrote in my naivety will be my legacy. I apologize in advance.