"You cannot teach accountability to someone who's built their identity around avoiding it. Growth requires discomfort, and some people would rather sacrifice relationships than face themselves.

People build their identity around avoidance when accountability feels unsafe. If responsibility was met with punishment, shame, or withdrawal, they learned to survive by deflecting, blaming, and controlling the narrative. Avoidance, in many ways, became their armor.

As adults, the same defense shows up as denial, minimization, or justification.

They rewrite events to stay the victim. They intellectualize their behavior instead of feeling it. They distance themselves from the impact they've had on others because facing it would unravel who they believe they are."

How to Live by Todd Dillard

 

Depravity begins with thinking of love 

as a radical act. I quit loving 

with difficulty. I love

easy now. Two parakeets on my shoulders.

They’ll fly away if I move. So I move.

I love flight. I love cages

left wide open. I am not a window.

I could be a window. Open me,

you’ll find a dense wood,

children wandering inside it.

Not lost children. They know the way.

They live the way horses run.

If they each had a bird in hand

they would open their hands.

 "Some people aren't speaking to you because they owe you an apology. Avoidance is often how unprocessed shame shows up, because sitting with the impact of their behavior would require accountability they're not ready for."

The End and the Beginning by Wislawa Szymborska

 

After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won't

straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble

to the side of the road,

so the corpse-filled wagons

can pass.

Someone has to get mired

in scum and ashes,

sofa springs,

splintered glass,

and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder

to prop up a wall,

Someone has to glaze a window,

rehang a door.

Photogenic it's not,

and takes years.

All the cameras have left

for another war.

We'll need the bridges back,

and new railway stations.

Sleeves will go ragged

from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,

still recalls the way it was.

Someone else listens

and nods with unsevered head.

But already there are those nearby

starting to mill about

who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes

sometimes someone still unearths

rusted-out arguments

and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew

what was going on here

must make way for

those who know little.

And less than little.

And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown

causes and effects,

someone must be stretched out

blade of grass in his mouth

gazing at the clouds.

Spider by Andrea Gibson

All of my pain is a spider 
I’ve learned not to crush 
with the heel of my shoe 

but to guide with a page 
of my journal 
into an empty glass. 

I ask questions about 
its life, its purpose 
as I walk careful 

out to the garden and rest 
it down on the earth. 
My pain—how happy 

it is to leave me 
whenever I treat it 
kind. 

“You cannot control the version of you that lives inside someone else’s mind.”

Stories I don’t want to tell