I didn’t pause because I realized that I was in-other-wordsing with the worst of them. I didn’t pause because I realized that I was treating debate as war and was desperately eager for victory. I paused because my hands were shaking so violently I couldn’t type accurately. That’s how angry I was. So I had to “give it five minutes”; I didn’t have a choice. And during that enforced break I did start to realize what I was doing—what I was becoming. I wasn’t offering “close attention and deep empathy”; my sensibility did not overlap with “caregiving” at any point.
