Anna Could See Everyone Else’s Side Except Her Own
Anna believed strongly in understanding context. She just wasn’t always very good at applying the same rule to herself.
Anna was very good at explaining other people.
David was tired.
One of the children was overwhelmed.
Somebody had misunderstood.
Somebody else was under pressure.
There was usually context.
Then Anna would look at something she had done badly and arrive at a considerably shorter explanation.
I should have done better.
Apparently this policy had exclusions.
Anna could look back at a difficult family period and find explanations for almost everyone.
The children had been growing up.
They needed independence.
David had been carrying a lot of practical responsibility.
Everyone had been trying to manage changing needs.
Then Anna reached herself.
She remembered the times she had shouted.
The times she had become stuck on something.
The times she had not been the mother or partner she wanted to be.
Suddenly context disappeared.
Anna had accidentally developed two standards
For other people
What was happening?
What pressure were they under?
What did they understand at the time?
What capacity did they have?
What were they trying to do?
For Anna
You should have known.
You should have coped.
You should have tried harder.
You should have handled it better.
Next case.
There was a reason Anna had become wary of explanations.
She did not want to excuse things she regretted.
If she had hurt somebody, she wanted to take responsibility.
So whenever her brain supplied information about exhaustion, pain, overload, health, neurodivergence or reduced capacity, another part of Anna’s brain immediately objected.
That’s an excuse.
Eventually Anna noticed something odd.
She did not use that rule consistently.
That did not mean Anna had done nothing wrong.
She had.
There were things she wished she had handled differently.
There were apologies she needed to make.
There were patterns she needed to change.
But Anna slowly learned that responsibility and self-condemnation were not synonyms.
Anna started asking fairer questions
Fairness worked in both directions
There was another side Anna had to watch too.
When she felt blamed or misunderstood, she could become so focused on explaining her context that somebody else’s experience became harder to see.
That wasn’t fair either.
Anna did not need a system in which everyone else received compassion and she received blame.
Nor did she need one in which understanding her circumstances erased her impact on other people.
The same basic standard had to travel in both directions.
Anna began experimenting with a sentence that initially felt suspicious.
“I understand why I struggled, and I still wish I had handled that differently.”
Nothing exploded.
Nobody was magically absolved.
History did not rewrite itself.
The sentence simply allowed two pieces of information to exist at the same time.
Anna’s good-enough line
Understand the context.Acknowledge the impact.
Take the responsibility that is actually yours.
No more.
But also no less.
Anna still cared enormously about fairness.
But she started noticing that fairness was not only about what other people had done to her or what she had done to them.
It was also about the standard she used when making sense of both.
If David deserved context, Anna did too.
If Anna’s impact mattered, David’s did too.
If somebody had made a mistake, that mistake could be acknowledged without turning the entire person into the mistake.
Anna liked this version of fairness.
It was inconveniently balanced.
Which was probably the point.
