I’m going to share an anecdote that, on its own, probably seems small and possibly even a little petty, but it’s my hope that this will take us somewhere.

I went through a period last year of making banana bread regularly. I’m not much of a baker, but banana bread is fairly easy and the recipe in Joy of Cooking has always turned out well enough for me. (This is the thing about Joy: the recipes in that book are never the best or most interesting but they are always at the very least good enough, and, more importantly, they’re very achievable for beginning cooks. I learned how to cook a lot of things from my mom’s old 1970s copy of Joy when I was a kid, and when I moved into my first apartment, she bought me a copy of my own to help make it a home.)

In any case, one day late in the year I was working from home and decided to take advantage of some down time to make a couple of loaves of banana bread, and when they were done I posted a picture to Facebook with the caption “WFH day.” I’m not entirely sure why I feel compelled to post so many pictures of my food to the internet but it’s at least in part a sort of proof of life and in part a form of showing off. The loaves were surely imperfect but they were good enough for me, and I was happy enough with them to want to show people.

People usually like my food pictures, so I was a little surprised when a guy I only peripherally knew popped up in the comments to tell me what I’d done wrong. Now, having a relative (or total) stranger come out of nowhere to criticize something I’m happy about is not a new experience for me, nor for most people who spend any amount of time on the public internet. But just because it’s a common occurrence doesn’t make it a pleasant one, so I responded and let him know that I thought unsolicited criticism is rude, especially when it’s about something I’m happy about. To which he responded by accusing me of attacking him, and ultimately him telling me to fuck off and blocking me.

In retrospect, I could have phrased my pushback differently. Instead of framing things in terms of his behavior (“that’s rude”), I could have focused instead on how it impacted me (“that hurts my feelings”). That might have gotten a more thoughtful, less defensive response. Still, as much as it might be beneficial to me to be able to consider someone else’s feelings when they hurt me, and as much as I do try to do just that, it still always strikes me as unjust.

But, more than that, I can’t help thinking how rare it has been in my life to get a real apology about anything. How most times, no matter how I phrase things, telling someone that they have hurt me simply makes the person angry with me for making them feel bad about themselves, and resentful for having to consider my feelings. Or sends them into a spiral of self-loathing that I then have to pull them out of by minimizing my own pain, and that results in no change or real self-reflection. Or results in them simply dismissing me, telling me that I am wrong for being hurt. But how few times it has ever resulted in the person being curious about me, in them making an attempt to understand rather than judge or defend, in them trying to make amends, or at least stop doing the thing that hurt me.

All of this came up for me as I was listening to the latest episode of Between the Covers, in which David Naimon talked with British-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad about her recent book, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, and the lecture that it was based on. At one point, talking about moments of recognition and what stands in the way of such moments, Hammad says this:

Isabella Hammad: The lecture I gave is about recognition, but the opposite of recognition is denial. And I think that, first of all, the West is in denial in many ways. Less and less so. More and more people are confronting what’s happening, among the populace. But the institutions, the cultural institutions, the universities are denialist institutions. And I think it’s quite helpful to talk about denialism as a kind of phenomenon. Which is a denialism not only about Palestine but about structures of empire and genocidal histories which are, you know, not acknowledged. . . . So, there’s an ongoing denial about these histories which are now coming to the surface. So, you know, we’re seeing sort of the tip of the iceberg but there’s huge mass underneath. And there’s no wonder that people are in denial, because to confront that reality is to confront many things that structure their lives and structure their societies, and that’s really scary. I understand that that’s really scary.

Now, I want to be clear: I am certainly not equating an abrasive internet interaction with genocide. That would be wildly irresponsible and harmful, that kind of flattening. What I am saying is that hearing Hammad talk about how hard it is for people to have to confront the uncomfortable realities that structure their lives and societies, that made me think again about how great harms are so easily facilitated by the inability to consider that oneself might be in the wrong, that oneself or one’s people or one’s state might be the oppressor. How thinking of oneself as the victim can be and so often is used to excuse great harm. And that is true at both the personal level and the global level.

I believe that on some level, conflict is inevitable when people are in contact. On the level of individuals, the closer two people are, the more certain it is that they will hurt each other and come into conflict. And the question, then, is how to resolve that conflict. What do we do when someone tells us “You have hurt me”? In the best of circumstances, I think, we can say “It wasn’t my intention to hurt you, but I see that I have.” We can demonstrate that we understand why what we’ve done was hurtful. We can say, truthfully, that we are sorry. And we can commit to trying not to do the hurtful thing again.

In order to get to that kind of real apology, though, we have to be able to take ourselves and our own intentions and how we want to see ourselves out of the center of the interaction. And that is hard to do. It often feels like it’s too hard for most people. And so instead we will say, “I didn’t mean to hurt you, and you should focus on that instead.” Or we say, “No reasonable person would be hurt by that.” Or, “Well now you’re hurting my feelings, so we’re even.” Or, “I can’t do anything right, can I?” Our own sense of emotional self-preservation keeps us from looking inwards, because to do so would be too painful. And so it keeps us from making amends.

I don’t know if fascism and genocide, patriarchy and white supremacy, can be defeated by learning how to apologize on an individual level. Probably not. Probably, those forces are bigger than what can be influenced by anything anyone does individually. And even if these problems could be solved with individual compassion, I don’t know how to convince anyone to choose compassion and curiosity in the face of emotional pain. But I know that my own moral journey wasn’t able to really start until I was able to first ask “What if they’re right and what if I’m wrong?” And at least this feels like something I can get my arms around. The world is too big to change. But maybe I can help a person change themselves, if they’re open to it.