There are some things in life, and some people, who are not entirely rational. The complexities of trauma, history, context, bias, and whatever else create a perspective and an angle so oblique that it’s a three-body problem beyond measurability. Decisions are being made, but within a framework and behind a mechanism with no maker and no qualified engineers. 

This is not entirely uncommon.

And the sad approach to such a situation is to stop treating people like that, like people, and to start treating them like obstacles to be navigated. You don’t get upset with a hedge because you have to go around it, you don’t get upset with a tree because it crushed your fence.

But you do go around hedges and you do buck and clean up trees. 

It feels inherently disrespectful to think of and treat people in that way, but sometimes there are no options left, some times you just have ot do that because meeting them on their terms is only confusing, to you and to them. 

There was a character in a William Gibson novel who was talking about her step dad, she said he was racist, she said she knew he was racist becuase he was so sure he wasn’t, he was so blind do his own bias that he was certain it didn’t exist. That’s a blindness beyond blindness. 

She wondered then what she was blind to, what part of herself she was certain about, that just wasn’t so. 

I wonder the same thing.