Having No Fear To Strongly Say 'That is so far from okay'.

This past year I made the decision to call out certain behaviours from someone in my life who I have had to be in dealings with for a long time. Someone intricately tied to my family, whom for a long time I prioritized amicability with - in the face of some horrendous actions - for the sake of one of our family members. As that family member has grown and the grind of that process on me grew both greater and the amicability less necessary, I sat with the idea of beginning to do things differently; to hand that person's actions back to them, to not be silent and to stand more loudly for those who had been affected. The three avenues of freedom - acknowledgement, apology and/or accountability - had never been extended.

These actions involved theft, deceit, violence, lack of financial contribution, lack of participation and one of my favourite moments - dropping a child back home without any communication, when that child was sick because this person didn't want germs in their home. And we had gone away for the weekend.

I had to ask myself, where is the line between compassion and facilitation? Can compassion and calling out terrible behaviours exist simultaneously? Can I take a moment to call things out as they are, to stand in full power for my loved ones and myself, and still be walking the path away from suffering I wanted to walk? I'm still figuring some of those things out, I acknowledge that some moments are just about me angrily scratching some decades old itches but many moments are about calling out the untruths that continue to hurt those who were directly impacted by the initial actions. Actions that are still denied even in the face of undeniable evidence.

What I have discovered is something that continues to be reinforced in many circumstances - that often in society when people speak up, it is how they are speaking up or how they are responding to those initial actions, that becomes the focus over the actions that propagated the response in the first place. That the response is too angry or too aggressive or too real or too detailed or too persistent or too whatever - the smokescreen of deflection away from the action that the perpetrator took in the first place. Yes, we have to have responsibility in our responses - that's where the word responsibility comes from - but the actions that set chain of events in motion, the action that pushed that first domino to topple, must never be forgotten in the melee that follows. When someone denies their horrible behaviours, it keeps those things alive for those who have been hurt. It becomes a desperate plea for the truth, that can consume a life. The most extreme examples exist in the despicable processes, lies and denials, that have been the very essence of colonisation on Indigenous people worldwide. And of how victims of child sexual abuse are treated when they finally become strong enough, grown up enough to not be silent anymore.

There's an expression that I love 'being angry is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die' which I couldn't agree with more, the tricky balance comes in how you advance forward with right action, to call out shit behaviours but in steadiness and strength without the fragility of anger. Therein lies my continued lifelong goal. A goal for love, even for the worst of the worst, whilst having no fear to strongly say 'that is so far from okay'. Can anyone else relate?