Nimue Brown's Blog, page 400

Steampunk Hands Around the World

 

If you follow me on twitter (@Nimue_B) you’ll have seen me using  #steampunkhands  in the last few weeks and sharing content from international Steampunks.  There’s a facebook group here  with more information. Steampunk Hands Around the World, is pretty much as it sounds, a month of sharing content, ideas and creativity with a view to reaching out around the globe and making connections. Lots of information on this website, too. http://airshipambassador.wordpress.com/

 

Steampunk is all too often accused of being some covert program for racism and colonialism. One of the things Steampunk Hands is demonstrating, is that Steampunks are everywhere, in all kinds of cultures and drawing on an incredible diversity of history and imagery. Once you get into Steampunk, it becomes apparent that there is much more subversion going on that re-enactment. We owe more to the many subcultures of the period than to mainstream Victorian era colonialism, patriarchy, oppression or prejudice. Those period subcultures were amazing, and still incredibly relevant and resonant.

 

How to participate in this project? I wanted to do something that tapped into the international flavour and the sense of glorious exotic otherness (we are all that to each other), without falling into the traps of accidental racism or cultural appropriation. I am, after all, a pale skinned, dark haired woman of Northern European ancestry. This is an ongoing issue for me in all my work – the desire to include, balanced against the desire not to inadvertently appropriate or patronise. It’s a bit of a tightrope to walk.

 

I wrote a piece, working with one of the characters from Hopeless Maine. Balthazar Lemon, who features in volume 2, is a man of uncertain origins. That gave me a space to talk about the very idea of ‘where we come from’ and to reflect on the relationship between identity and perceptions, culture and place of origin, how we fit and do not fit, where we assume the right to belong, and where we do not. These are not issues that belong to a specific race or culture. No matter how inside, or outside we feel, how rooted or unsettled, how much we want to belong or want to escape, the way we make our origins part of ourselves, is an issue. The way we look at other people and make stories about what their origin and culture means.

 

In the Druid community this can mean we consider those who are ethnically Welsh and Irish to be more authentic. Across Paganism, we tend to romanticise the presence of Native American genetic heritage. Around the world, many people are grappling with the issues of how to take intrinsically European Pagan ideas, rooted in seasons that do not exist everywhere, and persuade that to make sense some other place. Who we are and where we come from… it has a lot of implications.

 

And now, a small audio clip, voiced by Tom Brown.

Steampunk audio

Green Media

This afternoon I’m teaching Green Party folk about media work. You may have heard about media training, how it teaches you to spin, bluster, avoid awkward questions, and take over the subject to talk about your agenda, not what was asked? That’s not what I’m teaching, because that’s not Green media policy. I think this is worth sharing.

The very first thing I learned when I became a press officer for the local Green Party, is that we do not do spin. We do not lie or wilfully mislead. This is very much at odds with the norms of the modern political world. It means I take pride in being able to do my job honourably and honestly.

Green politics explicitly does not go in for the shouting, braying, name calling and rude rubbishing tactics favoured by mainstream politics. If we can manage it, we’ll have a quiet, civilized debate with anyone willing to talk about the issues. I hate aggressive and rude behaviour in politicians, because it shuts down debates and intimidates those who do not agree into shutting up. The person who won’t even listen to a counter argument cannot be moved, and there is little point even trying to talk to them. That’s not democracy. So on Twitter I’ve found that my local Labour hopeful is endlessly rude and unpleasant if I try to talk issues with him. The local Tory will occasionally have a conversation with me, and tends to go quiet rather than nasty if he can’t answer a question. I don’t take a bullying stance when he can’t answer me, because I’m hoping he’ll go away and have a think. That would be way more productive. I do not agree with him or his party, but I respect the fact that he communicates with manners.

The Green Party does not have a whip. There is no pressure to hold the party line in the same way other parties must. We favour consensus approaches, so if you don’t agree with a policy, you get scope to say so. You have the option of saying ‘what I think is this,’ in public and it’s the decent thing to acknowledge if the general opinion in the Party is different. If it is the case that your specific local situation requires unique handling for some reason, working out what the Green approach is there will be more appropriate than just coughing up a standard party line. If in doubt, we have core values and principles, from which it is easy to work out the sort of direction to take on any given issue. Let me just reiterate that. We have values, and they are consistent. That matters a great deal to me. Those values are more critical than doing whatever it takes to get a person to Westminster. It’s not about naked lust for power, it’s about standing for something you care about.

We’re an evidence-led party. Reason, based on the best evidence available, underpins our thinking. It’s not about bending the facts to fit what we want to have be true, its about responding to reality. I like that a lot.

The only reason I can combine being a Druid with being a press officer, is that I’m working for a party where this in no way requires me to act dishonourably. It is my job to be truthful, to speak well (and for me, good speech is a virtue). It is my job to try and grapple with complicated and confusing things, and get them into the public domain in ways that make sense. I can be a political Druid because I am not asked in my political work to do anything that would in any way be at odds with my spiritual values.

Valentine Druid

A Christian saint co-opted for a festival of getting us to buy stuff. As a Druid, Valentine’s Day is not something I find all that relevant. I see the pressure it puts on people, in terms of spending, and proving something, and I find increasingly that I’m not tempted to play. In years when I’ve been in insecure, not-so-happy relationships, I’ve felt the need for some kind of affirmation. On this day, at least, let there be romance and some sign of love.

Tom and I started today, and will end it, curled up in each other’s arms. There will be affection and affirmation, and probably something indulgent with sugar in. Not because it is Valentine’s Day, but because this is how we are with each other, all the time. We pause to celebrate that at significant anniversaries, and at times when we just want to. Today we are not doing much in that vein, we have a book signing (Made in Stroud, 11-1) and the boy needs his PE kit biking home, and that’s going to account for much of the day.

As a Druid, relationship is key to everything I do. As a gothic-romantic sort of creature, love has always been at the centre of my life. Not the need to be loved by people, but the need to love, to find things and individuals who fill my heart with joy and inspiration, and who I can adore in whatever ways turn out to make sense. Not just today, but every day. People I write stories, poems, and songs for. People I go to with offerings of cake and other odd creations. People I speak openly with, and give time to.

Most of us are guarded and careful when it comes to matters of the heart. It can be a real block to relationship if you can’t have that flow of verbal honesty. It also takes time to build up the trust in another person, such that if you do bare your soul, you can be reasonably confident they will neither point and laugh, or run away. There are many different kinds of intimacy, of body and soul, of heart and intellect, and sharing any of those is a very big deal, and sharing all of them is life and self altering, if you get it right. This is not something to do lightly. It’s also not something to play at.

There is an intense language of soul friends and heart sharing. A language of love that is not in normal circulation, but that is used carefully and intensely by people who mean it. What I have seen too often is people appropriating the styles and expressions of openness and soul, not because they mean it, but because they like the impression it creates. Valentine’s Day can be a focal point for such things. A time to throw words at your beloved because they sound good, make you look good, create the impression of you as wild passionate, poetic and wonderful. If the creating of the right impression is more important than the intended recipient, you’re going very wrong indeed.

It is not an act of good relationship to conjure with language in order to cast yourself as the romantic hero. It is not an act of good relationship to fabricate the baring of your soul in order to play a part, or go along with the imagined spirit of a day. The desire to be loved does not make it a good idea to magic up an illusion of love, crafted from un-meant words. Tomorrow, you will have to deal with the person who believed you. The bitterness of finding that what was said, was not meant, is immense. So don’t say ‘I’ll love you forever’ if you are just hoping to get laid. Don’t call someone your soul mate because you like how it sounds. Don’t claim to offer an open heart when all you’re looking for is the reward of being found appealing, and your heart is nailed tight shut.

Romance without reality is a total waste of time.

Reluctantly Political

I had no ambitions to get into politics. I’ve spent most of my life wanting politics to be something that happened quietly and productively, somewhere else, leaving me free to get on with writing books and exploring Druidry and generally doing the stuff I value.

I have no desire to be in charge of anything. I’ve had small tastes of power, in Pagan volunteer roles laden with responsibility. I did not get much of a power kick. I did get a lot of anxiety about doing the job well enough, and managing the responsibilities. I’ll run things if needs be, but leadership is not something I enjoy for its own sake, only for what might usefully be achieved.

Politics is an invasive business. It is not prepared to leave me alone to get on with my work. It is politicians who sort out the laws to protect creative content. I understand from The Society of Authors that the UK affords the shoddiest creator-protection in Europe. VAT on ebooks really hasn’t helped, thank you politicians. Laws about ‘orphan’ works have further undermined copyright. Then there’s all the blocking and banning, and as a Druid author I have to worry that growing censorship will shut down access to my site, and if companies are allowed to buy and sell access more specifically, that could squash me. Then there’s the Trans Atlantic Trade Agreement, which I feel threatened by. As an author, politics has not left me to get on with it.

As a Druid, the natural world matters to me. I see both the sacred and the pragmatic aspects of our essential, life-support systems. I see how politicians are willing to sacrifice the clean air and the safe water for the sake of a quick buck. I see how economic growth is valued above tackling climate change, and as a Druid, this makes me very uneasy. How can I go around being a Druid and be non-political, when politics is trashing the planet?

I would be the first to tell you that I don’t have the knowledge or the training to handle politics. Then I look at the people in positions of power. Climate change denier Paterson in the Environment job. Gove handling teaching, who hasn’t grasped that you can’t make all children perform above average. Osbourn, whose austerity cuts turn out to be very expensive indeed. It’s hard to protest that I’m not clever or informed enough to do a better job, in face of what I see happening.

So I joined the Green Party some years ago, and last year I took on a much more active role, and I’m going to be doing a lot of campaign work. I’ll be supporting EU candidate Molly Scott Cato, economics spokesperson, with a doctorate in economics. She’s knowledgeable, and sensible and doesn’t spend her time shouting random abuse or airing unsubstantiated opinions. I like informed, evidence-based policy, and I like people in positions of leadership and responsibility who know more about it than I do.

I’m tired of people in power who are just in if for the power trip and the opportunity to make themselves and their friends very rich. I’m tired of having to listen to uninformed fantasy and drivel from people who refuse to read, listen or think but who are so overconfident in their own prowess that they still feel entitled to tell the rest of us what to do. I want politicians who are wise, noble, well-informed, responsible and good human beings. That means, until we get to that place, I’ve got to pile in, and try to make some kind of difference. Then, hopefully, there will be some sane and relaxed space in which I can get back into the rest of the business of being an author and Druid.

Being Grounded

It’s not always easy to see what is missing from your life or sense of self. Sometimes, absences are only properly visible if you know what presences look like. Since last summer I’ve had a bit of a journey with this one.

It started with my volunteering for OBOD. I’ve been a volunteer before, but I’ve never felt trusted in the way that I do now. I’ve never felt confidence before, that I was doing enough, giving enough, being a valuable enough part of the team, and there was always that feeling of being watched in anticipation of my messing something up. I think this has everything to do with the culture at OBOD, where there’s a careful vetting process, but a person who has been accepted and trusted to do their job, is then trusted. I find it a lot more functional, and makes for a far happier working space. If I messed up, there are structures that would catch this.

I’m in an emotionally secure relationship based on mutual trust and respect. There is no sense of conditionality, no need to bargain. A feeling of having a place to belong where I am welcome and wanted. Being in this landscape encourages me to feel rooted, in a way that I haven’t for a long time, too. Again, that sense of belonging and being welcome.

It’s not been a smooth ride in terms of friendships and communities, because I made some significant mistakes. However, having recognised those, I’ve learned a lot about my need for people who are able to accept and work around the things I struggle with. Friends who don’t keep me up late reliably, and who either don’t trigger distress in the first place, or respond to it with compassion, rather than telling me they can’t be bothered with walking on eggshells. If I am not worth making some effort for, it occurs to me, then there is no reason for me to stay.

I have an increasing sense of belonging to a tribe that is glad to have me as a member. There have been too many times in my life when I’ve felt like an imposition, when no matter how hard I worked or how much I gave, I felt like a second class participant, and was given to understand how generous people were in just putting up with me. There were people who told me how difficult I was, how demanding and unreasonable, such hard work for them. I was to be grateful for the sacrifices they made in order to accommodate me. There weren’t many of them, but they were all too often people with power and influence in my life. Not any more.

I eventually worked out that if someone finds me desperately difficult, depressingly hard work and that being around me is tantamount to martyrdom, then the answer is for me to step away from them. I do not need people who feel noble and self-sacrificing about putting up with me. What I want are people who like having me around, who trust and value me, enjoy my company, find me a good part of the mix. Where I have that, I get to feel welcome and like I belong, and increasingly that’s how things are working, not least because I’m no longer tolerating the other thing.

A person who is not valued and respected, cannot root properly in their community. None of us are perfect, all of us have shortcomings, weak spots, bad days… the person who is scapegoated for that, and constantly reminded of it no matter what there is to balance it up, always gets to feel like an outsider, an imposition. I am increasingly conscious of the direct link between not feeling valued, and not feeling any sense of belonging. It’s been there my whole life; an absence that has taken some identifying. Up until very recently, what I carried was a sense of just innately not being good enough somehow. Not a person who deserved a place. There are enough people in my life who have treated me otherwise, that I’ve become able to think about it differently, and to pick out the minority whose attitude left me feeling outside the tribe for so long. A rethink of who I am, where I fit, who my people are, and a lot to consider about how we treat each other and construct our communities.

Rape culture

Trigger warnings, not kidding about with the title.

It would be a dreadful thing to be falsely accused of rape. It might damage your reputation and cause the people around you to trust you less. Were the accusations to be believed, you might be dragged through the miserable indignities of a court case, and if you lose, you might spend a few years in prison, years of your life you can never have back.

Most reported rapes do not end in prosecution. If it is one person’s word against the other (and it often is) then we prefer, culturally, to err on the side or the accused. Innocent until proven guilty is a core tenet in law. If it does go further, the victim can expect to have their clothing choices, romantic history, even their reading habits brought up as evidence that they probably consented. If you knew your aggressor, the scope for proving that you didn’t consent, is alarmingly small unless you went to the police with the evidence of injury on your body. Even then, it may be suggested that you just like rough sex.

As a culture, we value the reputations of those who have power over the bodies and bodily safety of their possible victims. We assume the victims have nasty, malicious motives for saying these terrible things, and when the pillar of the community, the famous person you saw on telly, the politician claims innocence, we take that seriously. Even if multiple victims claim to have been abused, we minimise the harm done ‘it was just a bit of harmless groping’ and all too often, we let it go.

For a victim of assault, it is a life sentence that will affect your relationships, your sense of self, your confidence and mental health, probably to some degree for the rest of your life. If someone abuses you, there is something lost that is never coming back. For victims who were children when it happened, I suspect this is even more the case, but children have a hard time getting heard when the responsible adults around them turn out not to be so good after all.

As a culture, we prefer to think that people make up false allegations of rape, rather than consider that rape is happening. It has been pointed out to me that the skin colour of the man involved makes a lot of odds here, and that we are far more willing,  culturally, to find black guys guilty of rape, and for that matter other crimes too. It is worth comparing the implications. An unchecked rapist or child molester can get through a lot of victims, leaving a vast legacy of trauma. Do we really collectively think that to be falsely accused of rape is worse than being raped?

Now, imagine the balance shifted a little, and that we became just a little bit more willing to hear the stories of the victims and marginally more prepared to doubt the stories of the accused. What would happen? Would more men become more wary about getting into situations that would make them easy targets for accusations? Would more guys be less willing to have sex with drunk and unconscious women who might protest about it later? Would people of both genders be less willing to abuse children? Would some people reconsider the influence of their power, wealth, physical strength, financial control and other means of manipulation, and try to avoid exerting those to reduce the risk of their being accused of abuse? Might it become important to the men who don’t currently give it much thought,  to make sure that consent is clearly given? Might we collectively reconsider the idea that a short skirt, an invitation to have coffee, getting into someone’s home, getting them in your car and the like are not the same as consenting to sex? I can see only win here.

A shift away from the desire for short term gratification and towards more responsible thinking about the emotional and social costs, would be brilliant and would improve life for everyone. We teach our daughters to avoid dangerous situations that might get them raped. We need to start teaching our sons not to rape, and not to get into situations of dubious or pressured consent, which is not consent. A little shift would go a very long way.

The problems of positive thinking

I see a lot of pieces online about how we can improve our lives with more positive thinking. Practice gratitude. When you are angry with someone, look at how you are projecting your negativity onto them. Minimise your problems. Love everybody. Now, if the only problems in your life exist because you’re a miserable, negative sort of person who projects this onto others, feels no gratitude and has no love in their heart, this may in fact work. In some situations, it can get you killed.

The trouble with glib positive thinking prompts, is that they do not have any nuance, or any capacity for detail. They also make you wholly responsible for your life experience. Yes, you can change any experience by changing how you feel about it. If you are being bullied at work, or beaten at home, you can make this easier to bear by feeling grateful for even having a job or a partner. You can tell yourself that it’s not so bad, and that you are creating the problem by projecting your negativity. You can love them unconditionally. This will destroy you, one way or another.

Then there are the positive thinking ideas that reassure us that we’ve chosen this life-experience for a reason. There is something we must learn. And ‘God’ would not have given us more than we can deal with. Fantastic, not only is you life awful, but you chose this before you were born, and your deity thinks you can take it. Again, people who stay in dangerous situations can and do end up dead. Every time I read an assertion that the challenges are here for us to find loving answers to, I want to scream. Some people, if you stay around and love them, will take you apart, metaphorically, literally… Sometimes the only lesson to learn is how to get out as safely and quickly as possible. It’s worth being very careful about this one, because leaving a dangerous situation can trigger rage, and statistically you are most likely to die at the point when you try to escape. Help and a good plan are essential.

New Age fluff is fine if the biggest problems in your life are that can’t have everything you desire, your ego is not stroked enough, and you have no idea how to be satisfied with what you’ve got. If your problems are first world issues of excess luxury and too much advertising then yes, those positive thinking prompts may be good for you, and won’t do any harm. If you go to bed afraid of the person who lies next to you, then lying there in the darkness trying to figure out why you are projecting this negative emotion onto them, will keep you there, and keep you hurting and frightened. If you’re being shouted at, if your days are a barrage of criticism, mockery, and humiliation, if there are normal things you do not dare do because you fear the consequences… stay away from the New Age noises. You do not need more love and patience. You do not need to accept that you chose this life course and have work to do. You do not need to buy into the idea that it is somehow your life’s purpose to deal with a person who makes you want to die.

Every time you read some statement about changing your thinking to improve your life, please, please add a mental footnote: This only applies if you are not dealing with a psychopath. This is only true if you are not surrounded by assholes, by petty, mean-hearted gits, or by those who enjoy knocking other people down.

Without inspiration

For the creative person, inspiration is everything. Any activity where you aren’t primarily just following instructions, depends on inspiration, and if that’s where you live, the flows and currents of ideas and creative energy become critically important. Like all flows and tides, creativity tends not to be a constant stream, because nothing natural is without degrees of fluctuation or change.

What happens when there is no inspiration? For an author, this is a place of fear. Writer’s block, is crippling. Not just in terms of not being able to produce in the moment, but also the fear of having lost it. There are no guarantees that your vision will ever return. On top of this, many creative people carry anxiety about being frauds. If you fear that you aren’t really a proper (insert appropriate title here) then the loss of inspiration can seem like proof that you can’t really cut it as a professional creative person. There’s nothing like fear, self doubt and despair to further shut down your creativity and reduce your scope to trust whatever does turn up.

I know a lot of professionally creative folk working across many different disciplines. What I see reliably, is people working long hours for not much money, and needing very high output to be able to make ends meet. The romantic view of the creative life, with the long literary lunches, the glamorous parties, and some occasional, pleasant, effort free not-proper-work is miles from the truth. I don’t know anyone living that way. I know a lot of people who work ten hour days and more, seven day weeks, producing gorgeous, inspired things and just about getting by. They create because they have to, because it is not possible to exist without doing it.

It would be nice to feel relaxed and at ease with the process, not worrying about deadlines, or where the money for next month will be coming from. It is easier to court the muse if you’re not conscious of needing money for shoes, or a thwacking great electric bill you can’t afford. When you need the flow of inspiration on full blast all day every day to have any hope of not sinking, block is terrifying and a disaster, and it tears people apart. We are not machines, and to need to run your inspiration as a commercial product can be to put your creativity in jeopardy. Burn-out can destroy you.

I think the last time I had a whole day off was in October 2013, and before that, there were a couple days in July. I’ve got a day in about ten days time, and I’ve been holding that thought for weeks now. The last few days I’ve been so tired, that the ideas are barely flowing at all. Yesterday, everything was making me cry, and that’s not a good sign. I gave up this morning and had a couple of extra hours in the duvet, just sitting there, not really thinking or doing anything because I was too shattered for even that.

Professional creativity means study and practice. It means polishing your craft, learning about it, developing it. It is a whole other thing from having a hobby, where you do only what is pleasurable and comfortable. These are the things people do not have in their minds when they say that we creative people should give our work away for free, for love. You only get creative excellence by working at it. Be that hours training your body for dance and gymnastics, hours developing your vocal stamina so that you can sing two 45 minute sets in an evening, or honing your skills so that you can capture a face in a few lines, be those of words or paint… If you don’t do these things professionally, you don’t tend to know what it takes. A good performer, a good artist will make it look breathlessly easy, but if you see that and assume there was no effort involved in getting to that place of simple brilliance, you might want to give it a try some time. It is so demoralising having all that dedicated work rubbished by people who want to justify getting a freebie.

In the meantime, I may not be doing much today.

Why Druids ponder

Pondering, reflection, meditation and contemplation are frequent features of the Druid path. There are many ways of doing it. We might sit in silence and see what floats up. We might focus our minds on a certain topic, explore a visualisation or undertake a pathworking. We might meditate through movement, or take a meditative approach to our ritual work.

Thinking is a big part of Druidry. For some, Druidry is better described as philosophy than as religion, but this is not in the sense of adopting wholesale a way of thinking about the world. Druid philosophy is not something you study, take onboard and then manifest in your life. It is something that you do. Philosophy for Druids is always a work in progress. There is always more to learn and understand. Deeper insights are always available, more connections can be contemplated. Some of this can be developed through study and debate, and by life-experiments and experience.

To go from those raw moments of experience to developing philosophy you have to process what has happened. Therefore, it is in thinking about our feelings and beliefs, reflecting on our experiences, contemplating our lives and meditating on our aspirations that we create, from one day to the next, a process of personal philosophy that has no end point.

I find it helps to put some time aside each day for thinking. How I do this has varied a lot through my life. When I started, I used the time before sleeping as my main pondering space. My dysfunctional first marriage coupled with the challenges of a young child made it harder to have a regular practice, and I took to snatching what quiet time I could for a few years. Mediation groups have given me productive spaces to work in, and the structure of the OBOD course helped me reclaim some life, time and space for my path.

Currently I have two periods, reliably, in each day that I can use for my indoors Druidry. I use the time before sleep for prayer, and reflection. I’ve arranged my life so that I spend a lot of time in bed (by modern standards) and am not so overtired that I fall asleep at once. There’s a lovely, warm, relaxed space available to me as a consequence. I wake long before I need to get up, and generally I wake when my body wants to, and am able to spend the first half an hour or so of the day reflecting on what I need to be doing, working through ideas, contemplating life, self, and matters arising. It means I step out to face the day clear headed, knowing what I’m doing and ready to start. This blog post was sketched out in such a way, alongside the two others I need to write before lunch. Last night I was reflecting on images from Gordon MacLellan’s inspiring poetry.

Modern life encourages us to keep running, and to exist in over-stimulated environments. It is easy to be bombarded by an excess of information and never have time to reflect on it, derive meaning or consider implications. This reduces both the benefit and the joy to be derived from any experience. Taking time to ponder, also means getting to savour what has happened to us. In having time to reflect, we integrate experiences into the stories of our lives, and we re-create sense of self. In stepping away from hectic-lifestyle culture, and adopting a slower, more thoughtful pace, we become active participants in our lives, rather than passive recipients, pushed round by whatever forces hit us.

There are many ways of meditating, many reasons to meditate and many effects of making it part of your life. If all you can find are ten minutes to spare in a day, find them, because those ten minutes will help you transform everything else.

(Druidry and Meditation, on sale over at amazon kindle at time of posting…)

Blame and responsibility

Blame is one of the least useful things we can go in for. It shuts down conversation, breaks relationships and all too often makes it impossible to come up with any kind of productive resolution. We go in for blame to protect ourselves from feeling bad about our own shortcomings – if we can out the blame squarely on someone else we can hang on to the illusion that we are fine, lovely, good people. Owning mistakes hurts. Equally, when we accept the blame, we can be demoralised, crushed even, by the value-judgements that go alongside being blamed. Worthless. Useless. Failure.

Taking responsibility is a powerful thing. Where blame is usually a blanket, and not very specific, responsibility requires us to unpick things. To take responsibility you have to know where things went awry, and what precisely could have been done that bit better. There’s scope for a learning process that takes you forward, safe in the knowledge that next time there will be new and different mistakes.

Blame cultures breed denial. If the consequence of owning a mistake is that you will be humiliated and shamed, there’s not much incentive to own the errors. In a culture that prizes responsibility, stepping forward to say where things went wrong is an honourable action for which you should be thanked. Most of the time things go wrong because of misjudgements, genuine errors, well meant attempts that were wide of the mark. Most of the time, those can be dealt with well once they are exposed and scrutinised.

Sometimes, there are people who are just mean and unreasonable. There are problems not born of honest mistakes but of a genuine desire to inflict suffering. If you come back with a blame response to one of those, the most likely outcome is that you will escalate things. People who mean to cause pain are not people who will shoulder responsibility for resolving it. What you’ll get instead is a flash of narcissistic rage perhaps, or some defensive lashing out to preserve that person’s sense of worth and dignity. If you think that someone else is genuinely to blame for a problem, the responsible action can simply be to get the hell out of there and reduce the scope for them to do something similar again.

How do you tell if you are the victim or the villain in a blame situation? How do you tell if you are blithely projecting your negativity onto someone else, or defending your crapness by blaming it on another? Look to the blame itself. If your impulse is to blame, and to push responsibility away from you, then regardless of what is going on in a situation, you’ve got issues that need looking at. If your impulse is to unpick problems and work out balances of responsibility with a view to making things better, you’re going the right way. If your inclination is to take the blame and internalise a sense of fault, this is not proof that you are the bad guy, nor is it proof that you are some kind of long suffering saint. What it means is that you have an unhelpful way of thinking about things, and you would be better off ditching it in favour of a more balanced approach.

If you’re faced with people who blame, then it is easy to internalise all the things they refuse to be responsible for. I’ve been there, and I’ve got t-shirts. There is a trap in letting yourself feel noble and self-sacrificing as you absorb someone else’s toxic output. I’ve done that too, and it’s not something I’m proud of, not least because it didn’t solve anything and just left me in a worse state. If there is shared responsibility, you have a strong relationship, a strong community. If there is just blame, it is never going to be good. Sometimes the responsible choice, is to go somewhere else.