Accountability and Responsibility

(originally posted January, 2006)

Why is it so difficult for certain people to accept their portion of responsibility for bad situations? Why is it always THOSE people who are so quick to try and remain close to you even when you’ve gone to great lengths to put them out of your life, and to add insult to injury, they insist upon identifying others whom THEY deem unworthy of membership in your elite ranks? Can somebody PLEASE explain this to me? …In the immortal words of MC Lyte, I am CRAMMING to understand this shit!

This particular firestorm was touched off during a conversation I was having with a male acquaintance who sought my counsel regarding a difficult employment-related situation. We got past that, and the subject turned to what’s new with me, and I mentioned my recent breakup. I didn’t go into great detail, as the person inquiring as to my emotional state was once (in the not-so-distant past) himself directly responsible for the intentional infliction of emotional distress. Know-It-All proceeded to inform me that I was vulnerable, and I needed to put a large gap between myself and the man with whom I am STILL very much in love.

Surely, I cannot be the only one who sees the irony and inhumanity in this situation. Check it: Know-it-all is a married man with whom I shared an intimate relationship that lasted a couple of years. For as much as I hate to admit it, there was a time when I started to care for him a little more than I should have. Add to that the fact that this cat was more than a little full of himself and lacking in the ability to pay me the proper amount of respect, and it was at that point that I realized that he needed to GO. Post-haste…tout-de-suite.

He tried repeatedly to keep a foothold in my life. Y’all… when I tell you this man was like herpes, that’s a damn understatement. Just when I thought I was rid of him permanently, he’d pop up to serve no other purpose than to chafe the crack of my ass! (That’s a LOT of chafing, fuck whatcha heard). More than once we had words (yes, I know – a waste of time and energy) about my lack of desire to have him around. I think all I ever wanted from him was an apology… for hurting me, for not giving me the respect I was due, and this fuckstick couldn’t even get THAT right. Tonight, I brought it to his attention that if there were anyone that deserved to have his friendship contract irrevocably revoked, it was HIM, and he tried to play the “but what did I do/why are you being so hard on ME” card. This is a classic illustration of a person trying to point out the splinter in the eye of another when he’s clearly sporting a beam in his own. He also had the colossal nerve and unmitigated gall to immediately revert to the “I can’t deal with this right now-I have my own problems” position that helped seal his permanent position as the one on the outside looking in.

For me, therein lies the problem. I can accept that we all do things to hurt the people we love the most. Relationships can heal when all of the parties involved outwardly and honestly acknowledge their wrongdoing and shortcomings, and commit to rebuilding (when the foundation is strong enough to do so) and not causing any future pain… with a clear plan in place as to how to move past the confusion into a mutually beneficial, dare I say loving, environment. However, the first step to creating a solution is acknowledging the problem.

Why is the obvious solution typically so difficult? A simple “I’m sorry” can soothe or sustain a wounded soul on a level most people refuse to see, on it’s face. We want to believe that if people were truly remorseful for the sorrow they brought to another person, then they never would done whatever they did in the first place. Sometimes we have to hang on to negative beliefs about the people who hurt us in order to pass from a place of hurt and regret back out into the sunshine. It’s hard to set pain and pride aside to accept apologies completely, but we must take into account that sometimes it’s the hardest thing in the world just to offer the sentiment. Even harder is knowing what the absence of apology represents… *sigh*

I say all this to say that in the trying times in which we live, we must be extremely careful about the people whose lives we allow to overlap with our own. Certain doors, once opened, are nearly impossible to close, and we are all inherently responsible (whether we want to admit it or not) for the lives of the people we affect.

Touch responsibly…be accountable.