Ignorance doesn’t absolve you of responsibility. Be humble enough to accept that you inadvertently cause pain and problems. Be compassionate enough to love the ugly parts of yourself. Let go of pride in order to grow in the responsibility that comes with genuine care.
On my 20th birthday, I was heading to the 7-11 to pick up the local newspaper. It was late at night, and no one was on the road as I crossed the lane to turn left into the corner store. But just as I was unbuckling my seatbelt, a police car sitting in the dark alley flashed his lights, got out and walked towards me.
I looked around, thinking he had signaled someone else, but he continued towards me, so I unrolled my window instead of getting out.
“Have you been drinking?” he asked accusingly.
“No, I don’t drink,” I said. “I’m confused, did I do something wrong? Is my taillight out?”
“Don’t be smart with me, ma’am,” the cop glared.
Too baffled to reply, I sat there silently. He continued to interrogate me about where I’d been and what I was doing and I said I’d just left my parents’ house on my way to my apartment and was stopping to pick up a paper. But he didn’t believe me and kept questioning me.
“Look sir,” I said, now angry for being judged for no apparent reason. “Are you going to tell me what you think I did wrong, because I need to go to bed so I can work tomorrow, and playing this guessing game is not acceptable.”
“Don’t talk back to an officer,” he said gruffly.
“Then what did I do?”
“You know what you did. You crossed a double-double and that’s illegal.”
“What’s a double-double?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes and asked for my ID. I handed it over and he walked away to write up a ticket. After 20 minutes, he sauntered back to me and handed me the slip with my ID.
“You have a clean record but you need to learn that ignorance does not absolve you of responsibility. You made an illegal left turn into this establishment and must pay the consequences.”
I still didn’t understand my offense. After he left, I angrily slammed my car door and went inside the gas station to get my free paper that would now cost me several days penance at a traffic school to wipe my record of this stupid incident. I had done nothing wrong!
“I’m sorry,” the clerk said when I bought a candy bar to ease my tension. “That cop camps at my store and tickets everyone that crosses the line.”
“What line though?” I asked. “I have no idea what he was talking about.”
“Most people don’t, which is why he catches them. In order to get to our parking lot from the far lane, you’d have to go through the light and turn around further down the road since there’s no u-turn at the light. Then you could come back and turn right into our lot. But most people cross over the solid double-double yellow line. When the doubles are spaced out by 2 feet or more, it’s considered a barrier.”
“How is anyone supposed to know that?” I said. “That’s a stupid rule.”
The clerk shrugged. “Yeah, it is, but since he started ticketing people for that, I haven’t had anyone try to shoplift here. I think it’s dirty, but I do feel safer working here.”
“I guess, but he was such a jerk. He kept accusing me of drinking or doing something shady. Do I look like a drunk driver?”
The clerk shrugged again. “I think he’s used to people acting innocent to get out of tickets when they know they did something wrong, especially young kids like you.”
“But I didn’t do anything wrong!”
“Ignorance does not absolve you of responsibility,” he repeated the cop’s line.
Ugh! I grabbed my candy bar and stomped back to my car. Who cared about the stupid rule when there was no traffic anyway!
As I drove home, extra mindful about my speed and spacing between cars, I fumed more about being accused of drinking and carousing. Then I remembered the other thing the clerk said, that he felt safer ever since the cop started ticketing people.
Years later, I am often irritated on the dance floor when people meander all over the place without consideration for other dancers on the floor. Most of them have no clue that there is such a thing as social dance etiquette. There are invisible lanes for traveling dances going in the same direction while stationary dances are supposed to be done in the middle of the floor. Awareness of rules and propriety create a safer environment where dancers (or drivers) can feel free to relax and play and have fun. These standards are there by virtue of consideration of others around us.
Consideration requires awareness, both of ourselves and others. Relational self-awareness is our responsibility; claiming you didn’t know better is a lame excuse for disrespect. When defensiveness keeps you in denial, you are, by default, self-absorbed because you are focused on being the victim of unjust feedback instead of seeing the bigger picture of creating harmony.
In relationships, crossing lines can look like this:
Adult daughter to mother: “I want to change the way we communicate so I can feel safer to open up to you. When you tell me I'm fine and need to pull myself together, I learned that my feelings of insecurity needed to be buried instead of acknowledged. To this day, I don’t want to let you see me mess up because I know you will minimize it and say it doesn’t matter.”
Mother: “So you want me to let you wallow in self-pity?”
Daughter: “I don't want to wallow, but I want to know it’s ok to feel what I feel and to be human. If I was shown compassion when I fell down, I would not feel so pressured to get it right next time. I could relax and feel confident you still loved me when I messed up and know that you had my back.”
Mother: “But I do love you when you mess up.”
Daughter: “I don’t feel loved when you bypass my experience and only give me positive feedback when I perform well. Why do you think I became a perfectionist?”
Mother: “Look, I didn’t know all this psychology about mothering when you were little. How could I have possibly played out these scenarios that way. In my day, parents were supposed to toughen up their kids. I did the best I could and you chastise me for rules I never knew about.”
Daughter: “I didn’t say you were supposed to know how to parent me differently. I said that this is how it affected me. And now that you know, we can work on establishing a better relationship.”
I was angry for years about that ticket, but I never turned left in a double-double again in my life. I also never would have known the rule existed if I had never made the mistake. And I realized that the cop was actually helping people learn how to prevent crashes while also helping the shop worker feel safe. Sometimes there are farther reaching consequences from a trivial rule.
My mom, on the other hand, still made left turns on double-doubles with me because my request was seen as a judgement of failure. But by then, I closed the shop, even though that wasn’t what I had wanted to do.
Me to my boyfriend: “When I walk into the room and you are engaged with your computer, would you do me a favor and just look up and say hi? When you don’t acknowledge me, I feel invisible, the way I always did when I was a kid.”
Boyfriend looks at me blankly: “So you want me to drop everything whenever you walk by me?”
Me, feeling embarrassed: “No, that's not what I said. When I walk by you and touch your shoulder or run my hand across your back, you act like you don't even notice."
Boyfriend: “What am I supposed to do? Quit working and spend all my time with you?”
Me: “No. I'm just asking for you to do for me what I do for you. If you walk into a room while I am listening to a podcast, I press pause and create space for you if you want to talk. If I am busy, I can just say so, but if I ignored you because I was too engrossed in my stuff, I would be communicating that my stuff is more important than you.”
My boyfriend: “That’s not the message I’d get, and that’s not what I am doing to you.”
Me: “Well, when you don’t acknowledge me, I feel like I don’t matter. It doesn’t take much; just look up, smile, and return to what you are doing. It would make me feel seen.”
My boyfriend: “Fine.”
He did in fact play the script and would stop and say hi if I walked into the room most of the time, but it felt cold and spiteful, and I wished I hadn’t asked. He would make a spectacle of doing a u-turn down the street to prove he was obeying my wishes. It required my closing the shop for him to start genuinely treating me like I was important instead of working through a script.
When bids for connection are dismissed, we feel disrespected. The connection dies. We cannot make someone who lacks emotional awareness take responsibility, but we can maintain our self-respect by asking to be treated differently and enforcing boundaries when we are not.
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