Exhausting Yourself
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Not so long ago, a woman I follow on IG messaged me. She asks how I could follow this other guy, when he followed this other-other guy that she felt was problematic. I didn’t know what to say. I also disliked the other-other guy, but I found it strange to be policing who people follow, and making judgements on another person based on this. It felt odd, but it speaks to something that’s been going on for awhile.
There’s a forensic nature to the left that is exhausting. And I say that as someone who is on the left, despite also being someone who thinks that having a binary for moral, political and social complexities to be incredibly dumb. But generally speaking, based on what I believe, I’d be categorised as left-leaning.
What is exhausting is the hall-monitoring, the policing, the waiting for ‘the mask to slip’. What is exhausting is ‘this person is good’ until the moment they say something wrong, make a mistake, don’t have all the information. It’s the lack of room for error that is tiresome. Because wanting to be part of a group that is looking for a reason to kick you out is a problem. It speaks to dysfunction. It suggests that this group cannot be sustainable if one wrong foot placement gets you zapped by the lasers.
Humans are imperfect. We are. That’s our whole thing. It’s what gives us the capacity for greatness. Because we can fall. Because we cannot always be right, or good, or bad. We are imperfect. And so when to comes to progress, or making nay change, it is irrational for us to expect that change to be perfect. Because the change is coming from imperfect beings, which means the change is inherently imperfect as well.
I spend time online. Quite a bit of time. And every day I see the same thing. Another person is cast out because they said something that doesn’t align perfectly, or they follow the wrong person, or they made a bad decision. And suddenly the group is smaller, and hate is spewing at a person who was, seconds ago, one of the good ones. And if this is our people, then it is only a matter of time before the hate comes for us. Because we are all imperfect, and we have all fucked up, and will fuck up again.
I’ve talked about it before, about needing a margin for error, about how we should give each other grace. If we don’t, we’ll continue to fight one another for variations in our values, despite us all wanting the same thing; a better world. So why do we keep policing, monitoring, waiting for people we ‘like’ to fall so we can point the finger and say ‘I’m better than you.’