Stone's throw

what drives me to even try

English is my second language, and there are words in it that have always felt thin to me, adjectives especially. People throw them around, describe each other as kind or genuine or driven, and half the time it sounds like decoration, a nice thing said about a person rather than a true thing. Earnest was one of those words for a long time. I knew the dictionary version, sincere, serious, means what he says, actually puts the effort in instead of going through the motions, but knowing what a word means and knowing what it would feel like to actually be it are two different things.

So one evening I sat down and tried to work out, on my own terms, what the word actually asks of a person if you take it seriously instead of just repeating it. And then, once I thought I understood it, I turned it on myself. Does this fit me. And if it doesn't, what am I instead.

That's a harder question to sit with than it sounds like it should be. Not because I was scared of a bad answer, but because I wasn't sure I trusted myself to answer it honestly. It's easy to want a word to fit you and quietly build the case for it without noticing you're doing that.

Sarcasm, and the version of myself I show people

I'm sarcastic a lot, with people I trust, and for a while that bothered me when I thought about it next to the word earnest. If half of what I say comes out sideways, was I ever really being serious?

I don't think that holds up, though I went back and forth on it more than once. Sarcasm is just a register. It's not the same as not caring. I talk differently with a coworker than I do with a friend I've had for a decade, and for a second I wondered if that meant one version of me was real and the other was a mask. But a mask is saying things you don't believe because it's easier than the truth, and I don't do that. I just say fewer things, more carefully, depending on who's in the room. Still one person underneath it.

The same thing came up when I thought about how I use social media. I've had one account for years, no alts. I used to think alts were mostly for saying things you didn't have the courage to say under your own name, and if you don't have the courage to say it, I don't think your account should be saying it either, alt or not. I'm already anonymous most places online anyway, so it's not like an alt would have bought me more cover than I already have. It would just be a second place to put the things I wasn't willing to stand behind. I never saw the point of that.

Work is where this shows up most plainly, honestly. I say what I think, even to people above me, even when I already know it won't land well. I used to write that off as a personality quirk, a bluntness I hadn't grown out of. Sitting with it now, it feels less like a quirk and more like the opposite of pretending. Someone managing how they're seen doesn't do that. They tell you what you want to hear and keep the rest for somewhere safer.

None of this is a big realization. It's small stuff, mostly. But it's the kind of small stuff I kept expecting to trip over, and I didn't.

A principle handed down sideways

There's a line I've been chewing on for years, longer than I can explain, from a grandfather I barely knew. I met him only a handful of times before he died. He was a schoolteacher, the patriarch on my mother's side, and the one thing that reached me from him didn't come from him directly. It came through my mother, who carried it forward the way people carry the things that mattered to someone they loved: a man must have strong principles.

That's it. That's the whole inheritance. No elaboration, no manual for what counts as a principle or how to hold one when it costs you something. I've spent years working out what he might have meant, and at some point I realized that's not a flaw in the inheritance, it's the shape of it. A principle passed down secondhand isn't an instruction. It's a seed. What grows out of it is mine to grow, not his to have specified. He gave me the demand for a spine. I had to build the spine myself, out of whatever life handed me to build it from.

I think that's part of where whatever earnestness I have actually comes from. Not the specific principles I've landed on, they're mine, I built them, but the fact that I take the demand behind them seriously at all. A value is something you hold. A principle is a value with a spine, something you act on even when it costs you. I'd like to think I have a few of those. I'm less sure I always live up to them than I used to be.

The friend I lost, which I still haven't made peace with

A few years back I cut off a friend, someone I'd known through a religious group I used to be part of. We had a disagreement that came down to him defending something where someone else gets to decide for you instead of leaving that choice to your own conscience, and conscience is one of the things I can't just let go of. I called him weak of character for it and walked away from the friendship. For a long time I told myself that was a clean story. I saw a principle get violated, I said something, I left.

It wasn't that clean. I'm still working that out, honestly, and writing it down doesn't finish the working out. What we argued about genuinely bothered me, still does. But if I'm honest, that one conversation wasn't really why I left. It was the last thing on top of a much longer pattern, the same friend playing the victim over and over, always managing to be the one who was wronged instead of the one who'd done something. That conversation was just the moment I stopped absorbing it.

I don't feel good about how it ended, even now. But knowing it wasn't really about the one conversation makes it easier to believe I wasn't just looking for an excuse to be right about something. It was closer to finally running out of patience for something that had been building for a while.

The part I've never really told anyone the whole of

This is the one that's harder to write, and I've gone back and forth on whether to include it at all.

I was around twenty-one.

I had a job I liked. Actually liked, not just tolerated. A couple years into it I quit and went back to the province to help run the family business, because I thought it was the right thing to do, even though I didn't enjoy the work once I was actually doing it. Four people in that business, four different temperaments, and the friction between us built the way friction does when nobody backs down and everybody thinks they're the reasonable one.

I kept showing up, for a while. I want to say that clearly, because it's not the part I usually remember first. I clocked in, did the work, clocked out, went to my room, and didn't come out again until the next day. Netflix, games, whatever kept my head somewhere else. I stopped giving it what I used to give a job I liked. And the pressure kept building underneath that, quietly, the way it does when you're absorbing it instead of dealing with it, until something in me broke. I stopped eating. I barricaded myself in my room for days, until my family broke the door down to get to me.

I've carried that for years as a plain failure. I left a job I liked to keep a promise, and then I broke, and the breaking felt like proof that I never should have made the promise, or that I didn't have what it took to keep it.

What I tell myself now, when it comes back up, is that I didn't break the promise. I kept it past the point where keeping it was safe to keep. There's a difference between quitting on something and running out of yourself trying to hold onto it, and maybe what happened to me was closer to the second. Retreating to my room, even the breakdown itself, maybe that wasn't betrayal. Maybe it was just what was left when I'd already spent everything I had on the promise and there wasn't anything left to spend.

And the business's fate was never mine alone to carry, even though some part of me still treats it that way. Four people, a market I didn't control, luck I had no say over. Telling myself its outcome rode entirely on whether I held together, that's giving myself a kind of authorship over other people's choices, and over circumstances, that I never actually had.

I say all of that because it comforts me, and it does, genuinely. It's the version that lets me sleep. But I want to be honest that it's a comfort I chose, not a verdict I arrived at. Underneath it I still don't fully know why I left my room those days instead of walking back out and trying again. Whether it was really the limit of what a person can carry, or whether some part of me wanted out and used the breakdown as the door. I go back and forth on which one is true, and I'm not sure I ever get to know for certain, so most days I choose to believe the kinder version. That's not the same as having settled it.

Two kinds of doubting yourself

Somewhere in all this I noticed there are two different things that both feel like self-doubt from the inside, and they're not the same at all.

One is specific. It points at something you actually did. Did I handle that fairly. Did what I say land the way I meant it to. There's a real answer to that, somewhere, if you go looking honestly.

The other one is vague, and it points at you instead of at anything you did. I'm not good enough. I always ruin things. Nothing satisfies that one, because it was never really asking a question. It's already decided.

I caught myself doing both about the same thing. There was a disagreement at work I still think I was right about, and I sat with it honestly afterward without it costing me much, which felt fine, felt like the useful kind. But somewhere it fused with something older, an insecurity I've carried for a while about whether I actually belong on the team, and it turned into the other kind. My supervisor has told me more than once that I'm valued there, close to the center of the team rather than hanging off the edge of it. None of that gets through when the other voice is running things. Not good enough was never really a question I could answer. It had already made up its mind before I got there.

Why the sidewalk thing happens

There's a version of me that gets into confrontations. I'm not ashamed of that part of myself, not exactly. What I actually go back and forth on is whether I should hold it back more than I do.

A couple weeks ago I raised my voice at some people smoking on a sidewalk outside a coffee shop, a spot where there's actually a city ordinance against it, a public easement rather than somebody's private step. I was right about the rule. I want to say that plainly because it's true, and also because being right and handling something well are two different things, and I didn't handle it as well as I could have.

It wasn't really about the smoke, if I'm honest. It was something closer to tired indignation, watching someone give absolutely no thought to how a small choice of theirs lands on somebody else. Not malice. Just the thought never occurring to them at all. I'm just smoking, it's harmless. That sentence is the one that gets under my skin, more than the smoke itself does.

I'm thirty now, and something about being thirty makes this wear on me differently than it might have ten years ago. The things that actually make life bearable for everyone around you are so small. Be kind. Don't make your convenience someone else's problem. Notice that other people exist. It costs almost nothing to keep those, and it bothers me endlessly how many people won't. I know life is hard. I know nobody's perfect. I've told myself that more times than I can count and it doesn't make the feeling go away.

I've started to think that ache is less a flaw in me and more just what it costs to care this much. The people who don't feel it when someone's careless aren't necessarily wiser than I am. Maybe they've just stopped noticing. I'm not sure that's something to aspire to, even if it would be easier.

Where I overcorrect

If I'm being fair to myself in both directions, and that's really what this whole evening turned into, there's a real distortion in here too, not just a good trait getting misread as a flaw.

I take accountability seriously. We're responsible for the cause and effect of what we do, and I actually believe that, not as a slogan I repeat. But that conviction overshoots sometimes. It reaches past what was actually mine and picks up pieces that belonged to other people, or to chance, or to circumstances nobody had any control over. The family business is the obvious example, but it's not the only one. I catch myself doing smaller versions of it too, usually without noticing until later.

The kind of accountability I'd rather practice means owning your own share of something precisely. Not more of it because claiming more feels more responsible. Not less because that would be easier. Just your share, and nobody else's, including the parts that were never anyone's fault at all.

I haven't fixed this. Naming it isn't the same as having solved it. But I'd rather see the shape of my own overcorrection clearly than keep mistaking it for a virtue every time it shows up.

What I think it actually comes down to

I don't know if there's one clean thread running under all of this. Probably not, most things aren't that tidy. But if I had to point at something, it's this: I believe real change needs somebody to go first. Somebody has to throw the first rock into a still lake, even not knowing if the ripples go anywhere, even if nobody notices. Nothing moves in still water until someone does.

I hold onto that more than I usually say out loud. I'd like one small thing I do, somewhere, sometime, to ripple a little further than the spot where I was standing when I threw it. To leave something a bit better than it would've been otherwise.

Maybe that's the confrontations. Maybe it's why I couldn't keep making excuses for a friend who kept needing them. Maybe it's why leaving that business felt, at the time, like giving up on throwing the stone at all, even though staying was slowly taking me apart. I don't know if that's the whole explanation or just the one that feels true tonight.

Someone said something to me near the end of that evening that I keep coming back to. The rock doesn't have to be thrown at full force every time. Sometimes the quietest gesture ripples the farthest, and the loud ones just make noise where they land and go still a few feet out. I think that's probably right, and it's the part I'm still learning. But the wanting to throw something into the water at all, when it would be so much easier to just stand at the edge and watch it stay still, that part I don't want to talk myself out of.

So I don't know. Maybe I am an earnest person. I spent an evening looking for the version of the story where I wasn't, and it kept not quite showing up, though I'm not sure that settles anything for good. I'd rather hold onto whatever this is a little more quietly from here. But I'm not ready to put it down.