The best time to plant a fruit tree was five years ago and the second best time is right now
Sometimes folks are kinda shitty for a while and then get better. I’m not going to constantly bring up every shitty thing someone has done, especially if they’re done being shitty
Finding out that folks did dumb things in their past doesn’t mean they’re a lier and they’ve been nefariously hiding their awfulness. It might mean they grew up and started doing better. Might
It’s awesome that you’re perfect and you’ve never done anything bad. Like genuinely, that’s incredible! But for the rest of us less celestial beings, life is hard and confusing, and we fuck up
This isn’t about anything in particular, I just want people to know that even though the internet seems to think the only way to be good is to be perfect, that’s probably not realistic and you can give yourself a little grace.
Perfection is rad, but so is growth. Let’s grow, together 💘
adding onto it with how I personally approach this
@robinhood As an addendum to this: it can be hard to distinguish whether someone has changed for the better, or whether they've just gotten better at hiding it.
My personal benchmark for this, that I've found to work quite well: are they 1) acknowledging what they did wrong, and 2) demonstrating an understanding of *why* it is wrong, eg. what harm it has caused?
If someone pretends that the bad thing never happened, or shows no understanding of why it's bad, their promises to do better are not really worth anything; there's no reason to believe that they *will* do better.
But if someone shows that they understand the harm and how to avoid it the next time, they will get the benefit of the doubt from me; when the inputs change, the results are also likely to change.
(I usually overtly state to people that this is my benchmark, and it has spurred some people to actually do the work of understanding the problem and improve, too.)
