Flaw Salad

Kindness is elusive. Maybe it shouldn’t be. Maybe the fact I believe it is means something is wrong with me — or maybe it is easier for people to believe that, anyway. Every day I move further from normal. From sane. From assimilation. I do not wish to adopt the norms of a society that feels inherently cruel. 

I am plagued by moral uncertainty. Concepts that once held firm shapes in my mind now turn amorphous and inscrutable. Community, for instance. Compassion. Care. Increasingly, I find the calculus impossible.

I need to revisit all about love because I think bell hooks tried to explain that love is a complex verb. But I don’t quite recall. I read most of it in a hammock in the desert, alone under the stars, which I used to do more often. Now I have companionship. I don’t do as many lonely things, and I can’t paint a romantic veneer over dusty nights spent at disappointing campsites where my mind would drum a constant beat: Why did I bring myself here? Instead, I try to love. I try to be kind. This is much harder than setting up a tent in the desert, and I don’t know why we celebrate one more than the other. I suppose loving well is its own reward. Accolades are a consolation prize. There may be no warm skin to breathe into at night, but you can have 43 likes on a selfie. 

To climb Mount Whitney, my training partner and I spent several weekends across several months completing three or four substantial hikes. We also planned and packed and drove long distances and stayed in hotels. We spent money. We hiked 22 miles over 19 straight hours. I shat in a bag. It was a significant undertaking, and people are impressed when I tell them I did it. “I could never,” they say. And maybe, yes, if I’m counting preparation, I should factor in all of the hikes between moving to California in 2014 and summiting Whitney in 2022. Quite a lot of effort. But surmountable. Anyone could do it, really (physical limitations permitting). 

Conversely, how long have I endeavored to be kind? All 40 of my years? Since college when I first learned of my severe empathy deficit, when I first landed in therapy? How many hours have I spent poring over relationship questions with therapists and friends and journals and strangers on the internet? Strangers in bars. Dates. Coworkers, even. What is the right thing to do, and how do I do it? The question underscoring every social decision I make, and I am frequently wrong. I am failingly kind. I am sometimes cruel. And this is what we are not supposed to discuss. Not out loud. Certainly not written in first person. Because I am told it is simple to be kind, you see, so if I admit to struggling with it, I must be admitting a deficiency. Perhaps I do have one. Perhaps there is a black hole at the center of my soul. Like many afflicted with what someone once called “preternatural self-awareness,” I am not yet convinced my failings are common. I’ll talk to my therapist about this — again — in an hour.

In reality, there is a potent mix of trauma, conditioning, and social ambiguity amplifying any unique deficit I may have. While I do not wish to yell in any circumstance, I was raised in a household that yelled. Throughout my life, I have been subjected to abuses that have imprinted triggers on my mind. And, I am a fundamentally passionate and vocal person. Sometimes I yell. Sometimes I am operating outside the control of my normal, rational mind, and those incidents are indeed personal failings. They are the mountain I work every day to climb, and there is no summit in sight. My therapist asks me to look for the parking lot, to remind myself how far I’ve come. It is too far behind. The mountain is large, and conditions are whiteout.

But what of social ambiguity? Allow, if you will, a hypothetical. It’s about friendship. A friend you love has begun associating with harmful people — the kind who ambush others at immigration court, who separate parents from their children, who send people to enslavement in countries they have never seen, who cover their faces and relish the brutality of their work. Or maybe that’s too real, too today, not hypothetical enough. Let’s try this: you are Jewish and living in Nazi Germany. Your friend starts spending time with Nazis and Nazi sympathizers. They start bringing Nazi sympathizers to Jewish gatherings. After you express concerns about the safety of your community in clear, calm language, they refuse to stop. What is the kind thing to do now? To whom do you owe your allegiance? Do you stay loyal to your friend or to the community they are putting at risk? Are you being kind by tacitly endorsing their behavior to keep the peace? Is it kind or unkind to sever ties?

People will have different opinions about this, and so much social strife lives in this chasm. We will not always agree on what is best.

When people say, “It costs nothing to be kind,” they mean simple things. Common social courtesies. Be gentle with children and patient with waitstaff. Open doors. Give up your seat to someone who needs it. Little things that remind others they are worth noticing and accommodating. Be a human to the humans around you. I get that. And I wish I were flawless in that endeavor, too, that I never cut someone off in traffic just because I disliked their car, that I have never been impatient with a customer service representative who simply could not help me, that I would never tell a stranger to fuck off for any reason, much less a petty one. I wish I were better at controlling my inner asshole. Maybe — hopefully — someday I will be.

A lie I like to tell myself is that most people, if asked, would say they wish to be kind. It is comforting to believe that people are doing their best. I have to shut out the part of me that sees people rewarding, encouraging, and following cruelty. We live in a society that values selfishness and greed. It tells people to look out for themselves, trust no one, hide their vulnerabilities, and never stop moving. That pressure makes people morally ill. I fear that most of my fellow countrymen would rather be successful or attractive or popular than kind. That is, if they answered honestly. That is, if they were capable of answering honestly. Most people in my country do not consider such matters. 

So, I am becoming insufferable at parties. The questions that plague me do not make for fun conversation over seltzers. People recoil. I am too serious. Too macabre. Too aware. No one, it seems, wants to discuss our moral obligations in the face of social decay. Turn away. It is too difficult to consider, to find answers that may require change, to risk upending the delicate balance of one’s fragile little life, its fraying tethers to the way things were supposed to be. I am fated, then, to pen essays to the void, to saw my own tethers in quiet earnest.

I saw a bumper sticker the other day that asked, “Are you kind?” Increasingly, I feel this is the only question. I ask myself. I ask others. I ask you:

Are you kind?