No One Is Better Than You: Letting Go of the Pedestal

Not good. Not bad. Just human.

It’s not that they’re a bad person.

It’s that they’re not a better person than you.

That distinction matters.

Because I don’t like the way we flatten people into moral cartoons.

Good person.

Bad person.

Saint.

Monster. (Ok, some of them are…)

Life is sloppier than that.

Human nature is sloppier than that.

There’s that thing people say about grocery carts.

Return your cart, you’re a good person.

Leave it out, you’re a bad one.

Even my husband has said this before, and every time I hear it I think about the many, many times I did not return my grocery cart.

Usually because I had a baby and a toddler in the car.

Because it was raining.

Or snowing.

Or one hundred degrees and the heat felt vaguely homicidal.

Because I was new to Denver and didn’t feel safe leaving them alone for even thirty seconds while I jogged a cart back across a chaotic parking lot.

What was I supposed to do?

Unload the baby and toddler and drag them through slush and traffic to perform my moral worthiness?

Abandon them in a hot car so strangers could know I’m one of the good ones?

(While simultaneously condemning me as a bad parent.)

Was it ideal that I left the cart out?

No.

Did it make me a bad person?

Also no.

And this is what I’m trying to say about people who have hurt me.

People I’ve loved.

People I’ve been in toxic relationships with.

I do not have to label them as bad people in order to stop putting them on a pedestal.

That’s the real work.

Because as long as they are better than me, then I am the problem.

If they’re the wiser one, the healthier one, the more evolved one, then the rupture must be my fault.

There must be something wrong with me.

Something not good enough.

Not lovable enough.

Not right.

But maybe that’s not true.

Maybe this isn’t about good vs bad people.

Maybe it’s just two people.

Two human beings.

Both trying.

Both failing.

Both bringing their wounds into the relationship and calling it truth.

That levels the ground.

It brings them down off the pedestal and puts us back where we belong:

On the same messy human floor.

And I need that.

Because I don’t actually know if I believe in “bad people.”

At least not in a clean, simple way.

Though, honestly, life has made me question that.

Maybe evil exists.

I think it probably does.

But what is it?

Is it something inside a person?

A trauma response that calcified?

Generational trauma passed down until it hardens into harm?

Something chosen?

Or something that moves through people when empathy goes offline?

I don’t know.

I don’t think we’re born wanting to hurt each other.

I don’t think babies come into the world cruel.

And yet people harm people.

So then what?

Because somewhere inside all this language about empathy and trauma is a harder question:

Where does accountability come in?

Where does accountability live when someone repeatedly, knowingly causes harm?

Not once.

Not accidentally.

But over and over again.

At what point do we stop ignoring the behavior and start naming it?

This question cracked open for me after Rwanda.

Before that, I lived in a kind of privileged innocence where I believed all people were fundamentally good.

Then I sat with stories from the genocide.

And something in me broke.

Because once you witness that level of human cruelty, you cannot go back to simple beliefs about morality, trauma, or goodness.

You cannot unsee what people are capable of.

There are stories I still cannot fully say out loud.

Stories that live in my body.

And they changed the way I understand people.

They also changed the way I understand privilege.

Because denying my privilege does nothing.

Feeling guilty about it does nothing.

It doesn’t feed anyone.

It doesn’t heal anyone.

It doesn’t undo harm.

So then the question becomes:

What do I do with it?

Try to do some good.

Not perform goodness.

Not brand it.

Not turn awareness into identity.

Just… do some actual good where I can.

I’ve tried.

I think I have, in some ways.

And maybe that’s all this really comes down to.

Not proving we’re the better person.

Not winning some invisible moral competition.

Just trying with whatever we’ve been given

and whatever has broken us,

to leave something good behind.

I think about my brother here.

Because all the money, all the fame, all the success did nothing to fill him up.

What mattered was helping people.

That’s where the meaning was.

Not in being admired.

In being useful.

And maybe that’s my wish too.

Not to be better than anyone.

Just to be a human being

who does some good

with the time she has.