When you grow up wading through cycles of trauma and interpersonal abuse, where everybody you know drinks to cope, nobody has access to therapy, and all we do is hurt each other because we don't know how not to hurt each other, the accountability discourse reads very differently

My starting point was never "I see did harm"

Growing up, all my relationships were turbulent. Full of regret. Because there was no normal baseline for how to engage with people, and every relationship was tangled up in the abuse of one or more other people

Of course I did harm

Being a young child and seeing that even your friendships are poisoned by harm done by the adults in our lives, and not knowing how to navigate that, and knowing that you're hurting people even when you don't mean to, because you don't know how else to be

Doesn't allow for ego

My starting position was figuring out where I fit into abusive family and friendship dynamics, how I navigated them, and how to make peace with every thing that could not be undone

While still living within those abusive family and friendship dynamics because I couldn't leave

I was a feral child raised on the internet in the 90s/2000s, because my parents decided I was too broken for public school but never got me help

I was one of those meanspirited teens we talk about today as a new invention, who spat venom anonymously because it made me feel good

All my friendships as a child were fraught and distressing. All my friendships for most of my adulthood, right until the point I started seeing a therapist in college, would make me so miserable I was sick all the time

I have deeply rough and uneven relationships with my family, which I'm just now able to work through towards something amicable after moving four states away and not seeing them for two whole years

There is *so much* harm in all of these relationships, on all sides

Which is why topics about accountability and disposability make so little sense to me

You can't imagine making people disposable when you yourself have been disposable. When you come from disposable people

Poor people

Addicts

The mentally ill

The abused

I've worked really hard not to feel disposable, and to hold myself accountable

To me and for me

That's really all you can do