Can You Forgive A Monster?

We never think we’d become monsters until circumstances show us otherwise.

Yesterday, I finished season two of The Vow, and it was devastating for the obvious reasons (Keith Raniere) and the not-so-obvious ones—witnessing Nancy Salzman come undone. The unraveling is painful to watch because it comes slowly, in degrees. Every episode is another layer peeled, presenting new truths, and those truths, once seen can’t be unseen. And then she turns the lens inward and reckon with all that she’s lost, the damage she’s created and left in her wake.

Salzman realizes she’s both victim and victimizer. Also realizing you could have the best intentions, but still be bent and broken and then have a hand in someone else’s breaking.

TL;DR: It’s complicated. But isn’t it always?

I don’t cry. Never publicly. It takes a lot for me to break. When my mother died, I swam in lakes in Nicaragua trying to summon the tears that never came. And while I sob when met with a puppy getting a new lease on life, it’s tough for humans to move me. Maybe because no one us are pure—far from it. Or perhaps I’ve seen too much, and I’ve grown numb.

So, I was surprised to find myself watching Salzman break down in front of the camera and how I wept for her and with her.

Reminding us that we all sometimes exist in the not quite dark. That humans are resilient, beautiful, and strong and fragile, shivering, and malleable all at once. That we could empathize with what Nancy Salzman endured while seeking justice for what she’s done.

But we’re not good at that, I think. Sitting in the uncomfortable spaces, in the murk and in the betweens.

Keith Raniere is easy to define for most. He’s a pedophile, a sex trafficker, a con artist, an emotional terrorist. But few people are truly this monstrous. In a world of 8 billion, few seek to ruin for their own sick pleasure or for sideshow entertainment. Most of us are decent, albeit fallible. We don’t oscillate between the binaries of good and evil, rather we exist on a spectrum. Often, we’re good if not great. Sometimes, we’re cruel. On occasion, we’re downright ridiculous and ignorant. Mostly, we try to be kind.

But sometimes, some of us will do horrific things—acts worthy of disdain and punishment. Our crimes may have been driven by fear, ignorance, desperation, pain, genetics, our environment and how we try to navigate the world intact—any one of those factors or a combination of them.

From Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then, I contradict myself. / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

Yet, why is it so easy for us to reduce the whole of someone to a single word? Why pack humans in neat boxes knowing we are the untidiest animals of all? Why are we incapable of seeing someone’s multitudes instead of a brief fissure in their humanity, a crack in their fault? You can empathize with someone while punishing their acts.

Multiple truths and emotions can co-exist.  

People love to armchair analyze from the comfort of their inexperience. Living to play the noble character in their self-created fiction. They’d never join a cult. They’d never brand themselves. They’d never devote their lives to a creepy mansplaining dude with questionable hair and outfit choices. People love to tell you how they’d live your life had they lived it from the comfort of never having lived it.

Although we’re convinced we’re stronger than that, oh, we’d never do that, it’s often the most intelligent and strong-willed people who are bent and broken to a point where they’re unrecognizable to themselves.

A few weeks ago, I was listening to a podcast retelling the events of Flight 571 crashing into the Andes. Of the 45 passengers, many were teenagers on a rugby team, and over the course of 72 days they dealt with avalanche, hunger, searing cold, injury and death. That the choices they made (elephant in the room: cannibalism) were carefully considered and made as humanely as possible. So, why is it after they were rescued and recognized for their bravery, their halcyon hero honeymoon faded into fierce criticism over the decision to eat human flesh? That, for a moment, their tragedy was reduced to an act without understanding the context or complexity of that act.

We’d never fathom cannibalism much like I imagine those young boys hadn’t either. Until a specific set of circumstances and a confluence of conditions made that choice the only one that furthered their survival.

Everyone has context. Everyone has a history. And it’s not shocking that a person’s values or belief system could be bent or broken based on that history and an extreme set of circumstances.

This is not about finding excuses but understanding the reasons. How else are we going to begin to know one another, solve problems, survive?

I’m mapping out a new book about broken people. People who do bad things but not all of them are evil people. Some are, most aren’t. And I love sitting in the discomfort, trying to unpack terrible acts in the context of the human who commits them.

I regret publishing my first book so young (early 30s) because I had an extremely binary view of my mother. She was a narcissist, with borderline personality and a lack of empathy. A brilliant mimic and manipulator, she could navigate the world with ease. And she made my childhood a living, waking nightmare. I wrote the book because I wanted my voice to shout, to be the loudest sound because she subsumed me. I wrote the book to settle scores. Now that I’m older and have distance from her and have reckoned with her death, I can see the context.

She was a victim of abuse and had a child at 20. She didn’t have loving parents, so she was starting at below zero with an empty toolbox. She was suffering from mental illness. she was a mother in the 70s and 80s in Brooklyn, which was brutal. She was poor, not well-educated, and on it goes. While I don’t forgive the fact that my childhood was stolen from me, that I was an adult out of the womb, that I lived in fear and terror and that baggage followed me for most of my life, I have empathy for her.

I get it.

My mother wasn’t evil—she was broken. Her acts were monstrous, but she wasn’t a monster, and it took me a long time to see that. It took setting aside my pain to see her humanity.

Before you sit in front of your screen as judge, jury, and executioner, consider the context. Lie down in discomfort. Step out of yourself. Empathize. Even when it hurts to. Even when it’s not fair to. Empathy isn’t about the other side winning or you ceding control, it’s about your ability to navigate humanity intact.

All of this to say I’m working on another book that, yet again, might be early for its time (like my first two books) because I’m widening the lens to see humans and actions. To find the context. To understand people and learn from them. To understand most of our actions have context, a backstory, and few are truly born evil.

At least, I like to believe this.

But Keith Raniere was one motherfucker.