Self-justification & ‘isms’
A snippet from the book — ‘Mistakes were made but not by me.’
No matter how painful it is to let go of self-justification, the result teaches something deeply important about ourselves and can bring peace of insight and self-acceptance.
At the age of sixty-five feminist writer and activist, Vivian Gornick wrote a dazzlingly honest essay about her lifelong efforts to balance work and love and lead a life based on exemplary egalitarian principles in both arenas.
“ I’d written often about living alone because I couldn't figure out why I was living alone,” she wrote. For years her answer, the answer of so many in her generation, was sexism: Patriarchial men were forcing strong, independent women to choose between their careers and their relationships. That answer isn't wrong; sexism has sunk many marriages and shot holes through countless others that are barely afloat. But eventually, Gornick realized that it was not the full answer. Looking back, without the comfort of her familiar self-justifications, she was able to see her own role in determining the course of her relationships, realizing “ that much of my loneliness was self-inflicted, having more to do with my angry, self divided personality than with sexism”
“The reality was,” she wrote, “ that I was alone not because of my politics but because I did not know how to live in a decent way with another human being. In the name of equality, I tormented every man who’d ever loved me until he left me: I called them on everything, never let anything go, held them up to accountability in ways that wearied us both. That was, of course, more than a grain of truth in everything I said, but those grains, no matter how numerous, need not have become the sandpile that crushed the life out of love.”
People who are insecure in their core ideological beliefs may feel the impulse to silence and harass those who disagree with them, because the mere existence of those naysayers arouses the painful dissonance of doubt if they were right in the first place.
