I’m not sure where to start. I could start with my feelings of trying to vindicate myself: of trying to convince myself, prove to my own body, that people don’t realize how susceptible they are to the pressure of a situation. At the same time, I have to concede that my morals were probably shaky to begin with–that with someone else’s conviction, particularly of someone I once held in high regard, I could be convinced to act against common morality. 

Not that morality is the real issue here. It’s acting against the best interests of others, or without empathy, or something. There’s a fine line between ostentatious moral purity and just acting in ways that don’t hurt other people. The same impulse that makes me want to forgive Eyelash is the one that brought me to tell HGF that she was cheating on him–that, and additionally all the other feelings that complicate this one and lead to these kinds of decisions–feelings of betrayal, jealousy, retribution, fear of losing a “connection,” a desire to be in first place even if that’s not what’s good for me, feelings of being less valued, feelings that emanate from a good place and ones that stem from a bad place. Was this the “right decision”? Well sure, but far too late.

Maybe I’m just acting in a way that’s messy. I was hurt, maybe I wanted to hurt Eyelash back. It’s like I finally threw the grenade that I was passing around for people to hold–giving them the option, if they wanted, to throw it; hoping they wouldn’t (or maybe just a little hoping they would–though the responsibility fell on me). I needed confidantes. And the more people knew, especially as they got closer to the center of the atom ball that was this whole situation, the safer I felt in that I was not keeping a secret. I hate keeping secrets. So a lot of people got a chance to hold the grenade, and look at it. And then I took it back and I threw it. Some people got hit by the shrapnel. It was to be expected, though it was unintentional.

And now I wait for the smoke to clear so I can take a good look at the rubble, and see what’s salvageable and what’s not, and what I can build with what’s left. 

I saw this thing on Instagram from one of those anticapitalist art accounts that was a drawing of a cat and a snowy mountain through a door that said “Moral purity will not liberate us, only solidarity will.” I have no idea what it means contextually but I found it helpful to think about.

I was thinking about those psychology studies that coerce people into shocking others with enough volts to kill them–even though no one in their right mind would do that to begin with. The power of social pressure and a situation can make us do bad things–over half clicked the button, I think. What do we do with the people who don’t have the moral strength to not click the button? Well hopefully not get rid of them. Hopefully we bring them back into the fold or something. We learn everything from each other, after all.

There’s a lot of twisted rope in this situation that I don’t have the expertise to tease out. Maybe I’ll read a book or something. I’m not sure you can blame people for being in shitty situations, and you can’t blame them if their brain doesn’t work right (Eyelash). You can punish them for their actions, but all punishment ends eventually, if we believe in restorative justice and all that. In any case, everything’s complicated and that’s why we’re compelled to talk about it.