You don’t know me. ⁣But maybe you think you do.⁣ You don’t know what I have been through. ⁣My past. My history. ⁣All that I carry in this lifetime.⁣

You don’t know the pain or trauma I have endured.⁣ Hell, I’m not even aware of it all. But it lives somewhere in my body.⁣

You might make up in your head that because I have made my work in service to healing and to love, that I shouldn’t still have my own work and healing to do. That I will not screw up. Make messes. Hurt others.⁣⁣

For you to assess and act as if you have me figured out from a glance or interaction, or from some words that I’ve written is a reflection of your own unwillingness to look and feel deeper.⁣ And from that same lens of your judgements you will likely collect any evidence to confirm your beliefs and biases about me and filter out the rest.⁣ The human mind is great at doing that.⁣⁣

What I want you to know is I am flawed. I do contradict myself. And I am a hypocrite.⁣

I struggle to even live up to my own expectations.⁣ So how could I live up to yours that are secretly hovering over me.⁣

I forgive you for your judgements.⁣ I can see that your preconceptions of who you think I am, have more to do with your own wounds, and your own past than they have to do with me.⁣

But I’m letting you know they do hurt me. ⁣And being someone that knows the experience of judging others, I know they hurt you too.⁣

We are all flawed. Most of us, making the most of what we were given and what resources we have or had in front of us.⁣

We are all in this together. ⁣All of us fragments of one source.⁣ We have all lost our way in one way or another. ⁣We have all been hurt and have hurt others.⁣

Self-righteousness is a poison. I know, because I have drunk from that bottle many times. It pains me every time I see shaming and condemning being used to try to correct others all over the interwebs and in person.⁣

When we empathize and seek to understand perspectives beyond our own and take on the practice of forgiving we can all win.⁣⁣

This is much harder work than choosing sides. Because we have to take responsibility. ⁣We have to look at ourselves. We have to be bigger than our own pain and our ideas about the world and what is true.⁣ Let’s work together and help one another see beyond this illusion of separation that is devastating the entire planet.⁣ Yes, it sucks to be in the middle of a pandemic, where we are all living with uncertain futures.⁣

But what sucks worse is people treating each other poorly founded on fragments of information that come into focus, based on some algorithm that we happen to get a glimpse of as our lives are quickly scrolling past us.