I recently found out that someone I’ve been following as a mentor faced some legal troubles in the last year.  They ranged from drunk and disorderly to public intoxication to physically assaulting a cop.  When I first read it my immediate thought was that this person must really be that way—super entitled, demanding, overall a real bitch.  I know social media and the like are all curated and we never see the full versions of people, but it no longer surprises me to find out that people who put on a persona of helping others or that life is perfect are truly jerks for lack of a better word.  But in that moment of judgement, I realized something else: we are all human and we all have bad moments.  Yes there are those who truly feel they are justified in making the world bow to their will, but for most of us we are just trying to survive and we all have a few days that we’d rather not share with the world.  They are simply moments in time, not who we are.  Our society is quick to let hard times define us—rather, we very quickly take someone’s hard times and make it define who they are.  That isn’t always the case and if I don’t want that judgement on me, I don’t want to do that to someone else.

So I realized that this could just be a moment for this person as well.  I’ve watched her over the last year and I never would have known that this event occurred—I found it quite by accident.  She has referenced “what happened to her last year” a few times and I had no clue so the work she is doing and the message/lesson I’ve received from her is far from what happened in that one instant.  Why do we feel the need to label a person by their faults?  We are trained to find the worst in people and then label them as that.  We don’t want the same thing done to us so we are trained to hide those mistakes and we treat mistakes as something to avoid.  When we avoid mistakes we avoid an opportunity to learn—and we falsely feed the belief that we know everything and need nothing from anyone.  We can’t discount the resources we have all around us, and we can’t discount the power of learning through experience—even if it isn’t the greatest experience.

Hard times either become a stepping stone or the stone that weighs us down.  I spoke about a staircase built of our doubts and fears yesterday, something that can get us above water.  Well, this is part of that staircase, another foundational piece that we can use to get us closer to where we want to be.  We are really good at creating shame in our lives and carrying that weight with us forever.  We are also really good at shaming others and pointing the finger, thinking it takes the spotlight off of us and our own self-defined flaws.  We all do things we aren’t proud of—they don’t need to be a life sentence. We need to give each other grace for our own humanity, to experience the learning curve and actually learn and apply the lesson.  It takes practice to stop that immediate judgement of others because we are so trained to operate off of first impression.  I know there are times I don’t want people to take away what they saw in me that day, that I want them to think differently.  So why would I do the same to others?  I want to see people succeed, I want to see people thrive, I want them to take their difficulties and fears and use them to guide them toward their hopes and purpose.  I want to cut the weight, not tie the rope—and I’d hope for the same grace for myself.  As I don’t want one moment to define me, I won’t let one moment define others.  I won’t be the foot on the neck of someone trying to build their lives, I want to give them a hand.