For the entirety of my life, I thought that I had everything figured out. If you did good things, you were a good person. If you did bad things, you were a bad person. If you got a bad grade, you weren't smart. If you got a good grade, you were brilliant. If you were rich, you were happy. If you weren't, you were sad. It took me 18 years to realize that everything in life- ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING- is grey. People are motivated by an accumulation of factors. Problems can be approached with thousands upon thousands of conclusions and yet- as humans- we live our lives through this 100% right, 100% wrong vacuum.
I'm guilty of doing it. I have certainly made judgements about people based on one action, and I have tried to approach problems with one simple solution. But most of the times that I've done this, I've found myself in an even larger predicament than I had started with.
One of the most prominent examples I can bring to the table is the debate over gun control. Often times I'll make the mistake of scrolling through Twitter and seeing what people have to say about the debate. And from what I've found, it's either:
- Guns are the problem!
- People are the problem!
- Mental health is the problem!
Seldom do I see a Twitter user actually come on and say "hey.. maybe, JUST MAYBE, it's a mixture of these three factors. Maybe, in order to find some sort of solution, we have to team up and work on these issues through these perspectives to try to get some kind of flow." It just doesn't happen. It's easier to blame a specific factor. And who can blame people for feeling that way? The issue of gun violence in itself is large, complex, and daunting. It is only reasonable to assume that people would therefore try to simplify the problem. But as previously stated, that practice only becomes more problematic in the end.
The same is said with people. Over the course of my life, I've met people who I thought were near perfect. And then I would be devastated when they would do something awful to me or to someone else. Therein lies the issue. How do you judge a good person who does something terrible? And at the same token, I've known people who I just thought were terrible people off the bat. But then I actually engaged in a conversation with them, or they did an incredibly good deed, and I'm left sitting there, wondering how to further evaluate them.
I've done the same thing myself. At least in my own eyes, I am a good person. But I have done bad things to people who never deserved it. I've snapped on friends, I've lied about stupid things, and I've done things that, in retrospect, leave me thinking, "I probably shouldn't have done that, ever." I've done things I'm not proud of. Different people have seen a different light of me, and my idea of "me" is never truly consistent in another person's eyes.
And so this brings me back to my original point. Life is never black and white. Motives are never black and white. And solutions, by and large, are never black and white. From the people I've talked to about this topic, there is a general agreement on this conclusions I just drew. But it still seems like we never truly do act in a way that evaluates all sides of people, and all sides of problems.
We understand ourselves. We like to think that we are good people. We have issues of our own which we understand are not easily approachable from one lens. We just need to be able to understand that those same qualities and predicaments exist in others.
