Not a Good Man

Well, fuck it. After a few weeks of trying to decide on which platform I wanted to use, I chose to just buy my own domain and host the blog myself. You won’t read it anyway, you awful sons of bitches.

Hang on, sorry. That’s the whiskey talking. Let me call down the spirits of my heroes and see if I can get through this without turning it into a vicious tirade.

What’s the purpose of this blog nonsense anyway? Everyone and their grandma is an editorial machine now; the only barrier being whether or not you have thumbs to tap out a reactive screed that falls within the character limit of the app you choose. Why should I add more noise to something that is already deafening?

Frankly, I’m not sure I should, but there’s nowhere else for this information to go. The ideas here are too long for short-form social media posts, too strange for polite conversations with normal people, and too important to me to disappear into some journaling notebook I would find in six months and destroy in a frenzy of frustration and embarrassment. Since we’re all here though, I may as well say something.



I am not a good man.

At 46 years old there are things that still feel terrible if I look at the memories too long. Terrorizing my peers as a preteen, being a destructive teenager, growing into a young adult who had no idea how to treat other people or even myself. I have caused harm. I have destroyed relationships through insecurity, drug use, and an inability to reflect on the effect I had on the people around me. I remember everyone I have wronged along the way and at one time, there was a nagging voice in the back of my mind telling me how to resolve these feelings.

Reach out. Apologize. Atone. Make amends. But what does that even mean, and more importantly who does it serve?

There are people who genuinely need to hear an apology from someone who hurt them. For some, closure and resolution are real and valuable. But I had to ask myself an honest question; was this about what they needed, or what I needed? I sat with that question for some time and the longer I considered it, the clearer the answer became.

I wasn’t considering reaching out to them. I was trying to reach out to myself, to put down a weight I have been carrying. To feel like I had done the right thing and to be absolved.

That’s not an apology. It’s a one way transaction in which the other person has no say. Although I am genuinely sorry for the hurt I have caused, that’s ultimately a problem for me to solve through reflection and not repeating those mistakes. I can’t help wondering how different things might have been if I had learned how to reflect sooner, before the damage was done, rather than spending years afterward wondering if I should apologize.

The regret I carry isn’t about my own discomfort. It’s about who I was to other people in the past. And maybe I should sit with that. Maybe the best way to be absolved is to see the effect you have on the world around you, recognize when it’s negative, then strive to be better.

With or without closure or absolution.