Redemption comes from inner forgiveness first, and that is much harder to give yourself than one would think. Self-forgiveness is brutally hard to do.
The shame and the embarrassment overwhelmed me. My thoughts raced wild through my ego-laden mind, to the point where I thought every single person I dealt with knew. And by knew, what I really mean is they judged me. They recoiled. They had disdain for me.
Every cashier, every barista
Every cashier at the grocery store. Every Starbucks barista. They just knew. I remember when I would go into a store and the clerk was kind to me, it would lighten my whole day — because this one person didn’t treat me like a social pariah.
Of course the reality was that nobody was judging me, because nobody even knew who I was. That is all ego, making me feel like I was wearing some sort of scarlet F on my chest for the world to see.
Waiting for them to google me
That feeling slowly started to fade with time, but then it was replaced with another one, at work. I was always worried that after an email, after a Zoom call with a potential client, they would google me. See my name, assume the worst, and write me off forever. Like by putting myself out there I was asking to be judged over and over again. Like this was my penance to bear for the rest of my life — that until the end of time I would walk forward getting whipped and beaten by the judgement of others.
Of course this is preposterous. I have personally been on hundreds of calls with people and never once did I google them. Not once. It is completely irrational.
The fear of being judged doesn’t survive the math
The strange realization was that people are generally focused on what they need to accomplish. What are their worries? Strangers, clients, and the vast, vast majority of secondary relationships frankly couldn’t care less about me.
Lesson one: redemption starts within, not from the external validation of strangers.
Lesson two: people, largely, do not care.
Three groups of people
There were people in my life who wanted me to fail. Who thought I was a bad guy already, despite my having done nothing to them. No evidence. No examples of me drowning puppies. These folks will lie and pretend to love you to your face, and when it hits the fan they are the first to stand up and cast you out. Some of them may be your family. Your own blood.
Others — very few — want you to win. They love you and would stand by you forever. The most beautiful thing about this process is that you get to see who those people are. They are uncovered like little bits of gold found panning in the bottom of a quick-moving stream.
But both of these groups are small. Very small, in fact. Maybe just a handful on each side.
Where you actually get to live
By far the larger group is the people you don’t matter enough to for them to care. And that is a really beautiful thing.
There is freedom and autonomy in the space they give you. They will treat you like they don’t care, because they don’t. And they don’t care not because they are mean, but because they are busy handling their own life. Most people — the vast majority of people — are just trying to get through their day, and don’t need or want to fill their precious time worrying about one more thing. You.
So we cherish the ones who hold us up. The ones who hate us and throw shame at us, we use as fuel to drive our positive actions forward.
And the rest — the ninety percent of the world that ignores us — that is where we get to live. Safe and warm in our autonomy. Our normalcy.
Next chapter: Seasoning on the Chicken →