You Can’t Convince Them To Treat You Well

On the choices of bad men.

There are bad people, of every gender, in every place in the world. The good outnumber them, you’ll never convince me otherwise, but ignoring the bad men and what they do, what they’ve done, hasn’t helped me heal much. I see them, I know them, and by the grace of many gods I also know that what they did isn’t my fault. Choosing to see things from the perspective of innocence, rather than causation, is one of the hardest healing lessons to learn, but thank goodness it’s also the one with the most bang for buck.

It’s a dad thing, certainly. Mine was shit, we can talk about it some other time. But when you have a shit parent, you learn things about life from the perspective of having a shit parent. That’s your perspective, you’re not given options. So you learn lessons and bits of information that come to form your reality, and certainly your patterns of behavior, all of them tainted by a shitty person. You won’t know any of this, of course, until you’re well grown, which is frustrating because maybe someone could have had a chat with me at 14? Some call these learned life perspectives core memories. I call them pains in the ass.

This is an excerpt from 1982, a newsletter by Shani Silver. I started my newsletter because Medium’s algorithms have changed so drastically that it is no longer a viable income stream for writers. You can read this entire essay as well as every weekly essay I’ve published to Substack since October 2022, here.