God's infinite curse

Let me tell you a story.

In the past week, I have said the exact same thing to two people. I have been told so much context, seen so much anguish. These people talk themselves down, they have posited they are unlovable. They believe they are punished, perhaps divinely, perhaps in the crust of the dust and the earth.

I told them, "You do not deserve what you are going through."

When I was married, my spouse believed in this kind of personal, ever-present punishment. They were not just bad, but the worst. Tragedy would be the lead story on the news, and they would believe it was their fault. There was an accent note of samsara to it. This sense of wrongdoing that was not only past any one person's personal capacity for wickedness, but to have this one would need many lifetimes to accrue such a curse and disgorge it in a precious few decades.

I got exceedingly good at telling this person they were not the cause of all the evil in the world. Perhaps the aggregated sins within the sludge of the human condition were washed away in the blood on the cross. Maybe it's just that the world doesn't work like that.

There are many things I cannot promise. I can't say things will get better. What I can tell people is that they don't deserve awful things that are happening to them. Suffering is not redemptive. It often makes us worse as people, not better. But also as a trans person, as someone with bipolar disorder, I understand the silent judgement that I am unworthy of sympathy. I made choices, I fell into deviance. A lot of this is religious but a lot not meaningfully so.

This is to say that though there may be a number of layers of flaking paint from the heart of the matter, to say people deserve to suffer and that it is good that they do, is a moral atrocity.

Often I don't really understand what people go through. I do not know what their actions were like leading to the immediate present. People can be negligent, foolish. They can have fucked up on an immense scale. But the people I know do not deserve what they are subjected to.

Things may not get better, but they deserve better.

Artemis