There’s a version of a horrific night that I have replayed countless times. I said and did some careless thing to someone who didn’t deserve it. I was tired, or defensive, or simply young, and in the moment I knew I was being unkind, and I spoke and acted out anyway. For years the memory would surface and I would wince, feeling the old flush of shame move through me.
I don’t think I’m unusual in this. Most of us carry a handful of these moments around. We pull them out, overanalyze them, tell ourselves what we should have done. And there’s something in the word should that feels safe, like it proves we’ve grown. Maybe we have changed, maybe we would do it differently now.
I think we’re wrong about what knowing better now means.
I’ve come to believe, slowly and with significant resistance and heartache:
Every single one of us is always doing the best we can with what we have at the time.
Not the best we’re capable of on our finest day. Not the best we can imagine from a distance. The best available to us right then, given what we knew, how distracted we were, what we’d been through, and who we were allowed to become.
This sounds like an excuse. I want to be careful, because I used to read a sentence like that and feel it as a cop-out, a way of letting myself off the hook. But it isn’t an excuse. It’s a description. It’s the difference between saying “I could have done better” and asking whether that’s actually true.
The person I was that night didn’t have access to the person I am now. He didn’t have the years, the pain, the lessons, the particular weariness that eventually taught me to pause before I spoke. To ask him to act like the person I’d later become is a category error. It would be like blaming a first-year student for not writing like the professor he could become. The raw material and maturation process simply wasn’t there yet.
We do this everywhere. We judge our past selves with our present minds and then call it growth. But growth isn’t shame in retrospect.
Growth is the distance between who you were and who you are, and that distance is itself the proof that you couldn’t have been who you are back then. You were still building that person.
Knowing this about myself changed something. I stopped trying to reach back and rewrite a night I couldn’t change or apologize enough for. I started giving myself something I’d never been very good at giving: grace. Not the soft kind that lets you off the hook, but the clear-eyed kind that says you did what a person in your position would have done. Now you are a person in a different position. The growth hurt like hell, so use it.
Over time a strange thing happened. Once I could extend that grace to myself, it became almost impossible not to extend it to other people.
Not from a place of sympathy. Sympathy still keeps a distance: I feel for you, from up here, from my better place. And not from a place of superiority, that smug condescension that masks as forgiveness. But from a quieter recognition.
I have almost never known someone’s whole story. I may have thought I knew. I have looked at a person’s worst moment and filled in the rest from my assumptions about them, and I have been wrong more often than not. I have projected whole histories onto strangers — the person driving too slow in front of me, the coworker who snapped, the old friend who couldn’t get his act together. I wrote the book of their inner lives for them and then punished them for the version I invented.
The truth is I don’t know what they were carrying. I don’t know what they knew, or what they’d survived, or what was happening in their body that day, or who they had to become just to make it to the version of themselves I was now judging. I don’t know what their best looked like under those particular conditions.
The person who cut me off in traffic was doing their best, given what they had. That may sound absurd. Surely they could have just... not. But I can’t verify that. I can’t actually run their life through my own filters and check where their choices came from. All I can confirm is that in my own life, the moments I’m most ashamed of always had a context that wasn’t visible from the outside. Why would I assume theirs are different?
There’s a word for what happens when you believe everyone is doing their best and you also stop pretending you can see into their lives. It isn’t weakness, and it isn’t letting anyone off the hook. It’s equanimity. A kind of steadiness. You stop taking everything so personally, not because you’ve gone numb, but because you’ve accepted that most of what people do is about them, not about you. They are, like you, a person doing their best with what they have right now.
That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped having boundaries. It doesn’t mean harm stops being harm, or that I’ve become some saint in an armchair. It means I’ve stopped confusing the harm someone caused with a story I invented about why. It means I can hold two things at once: what you did hurt me, and you were still doing your best. Both are true. Spending my life pretending only one is true is what was draining my energy.
Grace, then, isn’t a thing I dole out in one direction. It’s a way of seeing that works no matter which way I turn it. Toward myself, it’s relief: I was never supposed to be someone else back then. Toward others, it’s release: they were never supposed to own the story I wrote for them.
I still remember that bad night among countless others. I don’t wince the way I used to. I think about the person who said the careless thing, and I don’t ask them why they didn’t do better, because I already know: they couldn’t have, not yet. They were doing the best they could with what they had at the time.
And so, I think, were you.
