The Duality of Humanity

The Duality of Humanity

Something has been eating at me these last few days.

When I had my fall from grace last year, people I knew fell in with everyone else who was crucifying me. They shared what happened on Facebook. Other people chimed in. People from my hometown who barely knew me became enthralled by the fact that someone from the same place as them had made such a public mistake.

One person said I had “lost my superhero status.”

That sentence has stayed with me.

It is strange how quickly gossip travels and how easily another person’s worst moment becomes entertainment. People gather around it, dissect it, point fingers at it, and decide what it means. Some people from my hometown acted almost embarrassed that they were associated with me simply because we came from the same place.

For as much good as my hometown has given me, it has also followed me around in ways that have been difficult to escape. In pipelining, many people enter the trade through word of mouth. Someone knows someone. Somebody vouches for you and says you are a good worker, and you get your chance. Because so many people in my line of work come from the same area, I have carried my hometown with me almost everywhere I have gone.

Along with it, I have carried old versions of myself.

That is one of the hardest things about coming from a small town. Somewhere in another person’s mind, you are still the person they knew at seventeen, twenty-one, or twenty-five. They remember whatever version of you existed when your paths crossed, and sometimes that becomes their permanent verdict.

But I have been so many people over the years.

I am like an onion, as the old saying goes. I have layers from every person I have been, every place I have traveled, everything I have survived, and everything I am still trying to understand. Even in this present moment, I am complicated. I do not experience life in simple terms. Yet I have encountered plenty of people who see one event, form one opinion, and decide that is the answer.

Case closed.

That has infuriated me at times.

People who knew some past version of me saw what happened and threw in their cards to help crucify me in front of the world. They did not check on me. They did not ask whether I was okay. They did not wonder what could have happened inside me for my life to reach that point.

They simply thought, There he is. That is the real him.

Maybe the version of myself I once gave them was reckless. Maybe, based on what they had seen years ago, what happened seemed like confirmation. But recklessness has never been the whole of me. A terrible thing I did is part of my story, but it is not the entire truth of who I am.

What hurt was the feeling that people were not merely condemning my actions. They were deciding something about my core.

This is who you really are.

That cuts deeply because somewhere inside me is an old belief that I must be bad. I learned it a long time ago, and I have spent much of my life trying to chop down the roots of it. Then something happens that appears to prove it, and every cruel word becomes another seed planted in the same soil.

Words have power. That may be one of the most important things I carried with me from growing up in church. I was taught to be careful about what I said because a cruel word can plant something inside another person. I understand that better now than I ever did then. A negative thing spoken over you can grow into a root you spend years cutting back.

The person standing here today is not the person those people were describing. But when enough people repeat something about you, you can begin wondering whether they see a truth that you cannot.

I thought about the idea that the best friends are the ones who defend your name in rooms where you are not present. I have had friends and enemies. I have had friends become enemies. I have parted ways with people because our paths no longer aligned, our values changed, or we began growing in different directions.

That is life.

But there is something painful about realizing that someone who once knew you was willing to help reduce you to the worst thing you ever did.

They did not see the person who earned two bachelor’s degrees and worked hard for an education. They did not see the person who traveled to other countries because he wanted to experience different cultures and understand the world beyond the place where he started. They did not see the person who is deeply compassionate and genuinely wants good things for other people.

I have made mistakes. I have messed up more than once. But I do not want to harm people. I do not want anyone to suffer because of me. If anything, I can sometimes be overly empathetic. I can place myself in someone else’s shoes and understand where their hurt came from, even when that hurt caused them to hurt me.

That may be part of the irony here. I can understand these people, and I am still mad at them.

I am mad that the worst event of my life remains searchable. I am mad that it keeps appearing on Facebook as an ever-present reminder. I am mad that one terrible day can be repeatedly thrown in my face while all the ordinary days before and after it disappear.

It reminds me that some people really do want to watch you fall. They want to watch you burn.

Perhaps some people become so accustomed to negativity that another person’s misfortune begins to feel like good news. If life has mostly shown you the darkness in people, maybe darkness becomes what you expect. When someone falls, you do not ask what happened. You say, There it is. I knew that was the real you.

Nobody saw everything happening underneath my fall.

Nobody saw me trying to recover from a divorce and grow beyond a heartbreak that had hollowed something out inside me. Nobody saw the loneliness or the emptiness that followed me through ordinary days. Nobody was there for all the hours I spent alone, struggling just to keep moving.

Then something happened that negatively changed the course of my life, and suddenly people appeared everywhere.

They showed up to torture me.

They showed up to crucify me.

But that is not the entire story, either.

That is where the duality comes in.

Because other people showed up to save me.

When I first began thinking about this essay, I wanted to focus entirely on the people who hurt me. But the longer I sat with it, the more I realized that doing so would leave out some of the most important people in the story.

There were people who knew the best in me. Instead of kicking me while I was down, they started trying to lift me back up.

My friend Casey was one of them.

After everything happened, he showed up and asked me whether I would be willing to go to rehab. In my broken state, I did not argue. I did not fight him. I said yes.

It almost felt like relief.

Yes. I need help. Thank you for showing up and asking.

A group of friends made some big moves in a very short amount of time. They helped get me admitted into a treatment program so I could begin rebuilding my life. They supported me throughout the process, and I will never forget it.

I will never forget that while some people genuinely wanted to see me fall, others genuinely wanted to see me thrive.

That was the word Casey used.

Thrive.

That word meant more than he probably knew.

There is a line from Zach Bryan’s “Heading South” that says, “People come to watch you fall.” I understand that lyric differently now. People really will gather around another person’s destruction. They bring the popcorn, light the fire, and wait for the spectacle.

Human beings have been doing that for thousands of years. Crowds once gathered in the Roman Colosseum to watch people fight for their lives. We would like to think we have evolved beyond that, but maybe we have only changed the arena. Now the spectacle happens online. The blood is metaphorical, but the crowd still gathers.

It is easier to sit back and watch someone fight for their life than to extend a hand and say, Let me help you out of this.

I do not completely understand why. Maybe it is different for every person. We cannot be loyal to everyone. We cannot trust everyone. But there should still be room between blind loyalty and public cruelty. There should be room for compassion without excusing what someone has done.

Another lyric that has stayed with me comes from Shinedown’s “Daylight”: “Who shows up, who walks away, and who’s for real.”

Hard times reveal that.

When you fall—and especially when you fall publicly—you learn who is loyal to you. You learn who wants the best for you, who wants the worst, and who was never truly invested in you at all.

That knowledge has made my world smaller.

That hurts because one of the things I want most in life is community. But people are complicated, and sometimes people are painfully simple in the way they judge. It is easier to throw someone to the wolves than to ask why we are throwing them there.

Is this person worth saving?

What is happening inside them?

Why are they behaving like someone we no longer recognize?

The people who truly know and love you are often the ones willing to ask those questions.

I still wonder about everyone else who saw what happened. People from college. People from old jobs. People whose paths crossed mine for a season. I imagine what they must think.

I remember him. He seemed like such a good guy. It is sad to see what happened to him.

Or perhaps:

I knew him back then. He was always wild. This makes sense.

I picture these conversations even though I have no way of knowing whether they ever happened. Maybe that is insecurity. Maybe it comes from caring too much about what people think. I have always been a people pleaser in certain ways. I have improved over the years, but I have also struggled to set healthy boundaries. Sometimes I tolerated things until the only boundary I knew how to create was removing a person from my life entirely.

It should not require getting angry or sideways with someone before they respect the way you deserve to be treated. But sometimes boundaries are crossed repeatedly until you finally put your foot down.

Maybe that, too, is part of humanity.

Seth Anthony has a lyric that says, “You never know your strength till you meet the struggle.”

I understand that one completely.

The last few years have been incredibly difficult. There were times I did not know how I would make it through. There were moments when I did not particularly want to keep doing it—not because I had decided to harm myself, but because I was exhausted by the weight of continuing. Even then, somewhere inside me, I believed I would still be here.

When I was sitting in jail after the incident, I remember thinking, This is bad. This fucking sucks. But I have to take it one moment at a time.

The first step was making a phone call. I needed to let someone know where I was. Then I needed to work on getting out of that immediate situation. After that came another step, and then another.

That is what I have been doing ever since.

It is difficult to rebuild when you are already heartbroken over a life you believed you were going to live. It is hard to recover from a divorce, abandonment, and the feeling of being betrayed by someone you never imagined would treat you that way. Then you add a criminal offense and the consequences that follow it, and suddenly you are navigating several forms of grief at once.

You have to stop looking at the entire mountain.

You have to find the first step.

At the end of The Martian, Mark Watney explains that surviving was not one grand solution. It was one problem solved after another. If you solve enough problems, you eventually get to go home.

That is how rebuilding a life feels.

When you are standing at the bottom, the mountain appears impossibly high. You wonder how you could ever make it. But you have to begin somewhere. Make the phone call. Ask for help. Go to rehab. Hold on to the smallest amount of optimism you can find.

Tell yourself:

No matter how bad this seems right now, if I start and keep going, maybe it will eventually be okay.

Some days, you may need to lie on the couch with a blanket over you and tune out the world. Do that for a day or two. Rest is not failure. But when some of your strength returns, get up and begin again.

That is what I have tried to do.

There have been plenty of hurdles, but where I am standing on the mountain today is much higher than where I began. That is proof of how far small steps can carry someone over time.

Three months. Six months. A year.

You look back and realize you are no longer where you started.

Writing and journaling have helped me recognize that. I can look back over the past year and see my highs and lows. I can see where I still carry anger, shame, regret, and grief. But I can also see the hope running through it.

Somewhere inside me, I still believe it is going to be okay.

Maybe another fucking hurdle will appear tomorrow. Life may drop another problem in front of me that I never saw coming. But that is when struggle introduces you to your strength again.

When the struggle shows up, you have a choice. You can buckle down, cowboy up, and start walking through it. Or you can remain where you fell.

I struggle with regret.

I struggle with shame.

I am still learning how to carry both without allowing either to define me. But I have to hold on to hope that time, effort, forgiveness, and another step forward can eventually lead somewhere better.

Some people never get the opportunity to discover their strength because the weight of the struggle becomes too much. I have lost friends to suicide, and that breaks my heart. I understand the exhaustion that can make a person want the pain to stop, even though I am not in danger of harming myself now. What saddens me is knowing they could not see beyond the moment they were trapped inside. They could not see the possibility that another chapter might exist.

I do not necessarily want to become some polished victory story.

I am forty-two years old, almost forty-three, and whenever my life ends naturally one day, I will probably slide into home plate beaten, battered, and scarred. There is no way around that. I already carry scars.

Some people might ask what any of it is for. What is the purpose of struggling if life continues finding new ways to wound us?

People of faith may explain it through the struggle between good and evil. Maybe that explanation gives meaning to what they have endured. Maybe life is simply a crapshoot. It is already extraordinary that any of us are here at all, and then we spend our lives navigating the hand we were dealt.

I do not know the answer.

I do not think any of us truly do.

What I know is that because I have felt the humiliation of people gathering around my lowest moment, I never want to make another person feel that way.

When someone is suffering, I want to be the one who says:

I know it may feel like nobody gives a shit right now. I may not know your whole story, but I care. I want something better for you. If there is a way I can help, I will.

Helping does not always mean giving someone money or solving their entire life. Sometimes a person at their lowest simply needs to hear that things might eventually be okay.

Sometimes it is showing up and saying, I know this is not the whole of you, but we have to get you back on track. Will you go to rehab?

Sometimes it is remembering a birthday.

Sometimes it is sending a message that says, I thought about you today. Are you doing all right?

Those simple acts can mean everything when someone feels alone.

Maybe that is the biggest thing I have taken from all of this: I do not want people to believe they are completely alone. There are so many people walking through this world who feel invisible, abandoned, or forgotten. Sometimes one person showing up can interrupt that belief.

At first, I thought the duality of humanity meant there were good people and bad people.

But as I write this, I realize that is too simple.

The duality of humanity is that there is good and bad within every one of us.

Someone who wronged me may be a wonderful husband, father, or friend to someone else. Someone who has treated me with incredible kindness may be the villain in another person’s story. We are all capable of causing pain, and we are all capable of doing something beautiful for another human being.

The goal should be to choose the good whenever we can.

Not because it gives us moral superiority. Not because helping someone means they owe us gratitude. Kindness should be genuine. It should not come from obligation or from wanting recognition. If my heart is not in something, it does not feel real to me.

But how do we change a person’s heart?

Some people would say Jesus changes it. For them, maybe that is true, and that is good. For others, maybe change begins by recognizing that this world is already pretty fucking hard on all of us.

We all need help sometimes.

We all need grace.

We all need forgiveness and understanding.

And we need a whole lot of kindness.

The challenge is not becoming bitter after someone has wronged you. I can forgive the people who spoke about me. Forgiveness does not mean their words did not hurt. It does not mean they did not make me feel like shit. It does not mean I have to forget what they did or invite them back into my life.

It means I do not want to remain imprisoned by them.

Bitterness keeps the wounded person locked in a cell while everyone else continues living. The people who posted about me have probably not thought about it in months. Meanwhile, I could continue replaying their words, rebuilding the same prison around myself every morning.

I do not want to give them that power.

What happened was true.

I did what I did.

But it was a partial truth, not the whole truth.

A person’s worst action may reveal something about them in that moment, but it does not contain every chapter that came before it or every chapter that may follow. It does not show the heartbreak underneath, the struggle surrounding it, the people who showed up afterward, or the work that went into rebuilding.

I do not know how to make people read the whole story instead of the cliff notes. Human beings are drawn to the exciting parts—the dramatic highs and devastating lows. They often skip the ordinary pages that explain how the character became who he was.

Maybe I cannot make anyone read those pages.

Maybe all I can do is keep writing them.

I can continue climbing. I can continue choosing kindness. I can continue forgiving without pretending I was not hurt. I can continue becoming someone who extends a hand instead of joining the crowd around the fire.

That may be the clearest expression of humanity’s duality: we can be the people who gather to watch someone burn, or we can be the people who walk through the flames to help them out.

At different times, every one of us may be capable of both.

I know which one I want to become.