Found Innocent
at the imaginary cosmic tribunal
I try to write things down when I realize I’ve been wrong about something — not for punishing myself, but for integration.
Or at least, trying.
If I don’t catch the misconception in the act, name it, and pin it to the page, it has a tendency to just slip back underground and wait for the next opportunity to run my life.
The current misconception: that I am not allowed to defend myself or want things. That the universe will punish me if I stand up for myself or — Zeus forbid— try for something I actually want.
It’s a deeply stupid belief I still carry like an emotional heirloom.
But it’s there.
And in this case, it got triggered by my old landlord trying to keep half my security deposit. “Because you left it dirty,” he said.
This is objectively hilarious. Josh Slocum and I have literally discussed apocalypse logistics, and every single time the conversation includes the fact that my apartment could be turned into an operating theatre — the sterile kind — in about thirty minutes.
The CDC would look at my cleaning supplies and say “Ma’am, you need to calm down.”
I put up with four full years of nonsense from this man.
Four.
Including the time I fell and broke my wrist on the icy driveway he never maintained — even though the lease made it his responsibility.
I didn’t sue him then, mostly because “litigious” is not how I want to be in the world, but also because my nervous system was still programmed to treat standing up for myself as a felony offense punishable by cosmic smiting.
Also, I thought that with such a huge “do-over” he’d clean up his act. (That I was still capable of such optimism says something profoundly horrifying about my intelligence or profoundly endearing about my naivete. Dealer’s choice.)
Not only did he not, but I literally had to beg to be allowed to change where I parked in subsequent winters, so that I wouldn’t continue to have to walk across an icy, steeply downsloping driveway.
That he never did properly deal with.
So to hear him now claim that I dirtied his property?
Sir, I literally bled on your driveway and paid for the privilege.
(There’s a reason why some people say “land leeches” and use “rent seeking” as a synonym for “pathetic parasite”. #NotAll but also #YesSome.)
Anyway. I tutored a boy with two lawyer parents, and Lawyer Dad — who radiates that quiet, terrifying competence of a man whose paragraphs end disputes — wrote a letter on my behalf. And today the landlord paid up. In full.
This should be simple. It’s not.
Because here is the other layer: this is silly on its surface, yes, but it hits something very old in me. There are deep parental resonances wired into the “code” my brain still runs on — an abusive man and his enabling c-word of a wife, a whole childhood ecosystem built on the rule that I must not want anything, must not object to anything, must not defend myself under any circumstances.
My internal operating system has a self-destruct sequence baked into it that activates the moment I get near standing up for myself.
The stakes feel life-and-death even when the situation is just a landlord who can’t spell “compliance,” let alone follow it.
So I’m trying to integrate this. I’m trying to understand that I am allowed to defend myself. That the universe did not punish me for doing so.
That lightning did not strike me for saying, “Actually, no.”
And because life enjoys thematic synchronicity, the Drawing Pencils of My Dreams — the ones I wrote about here — have been located, ordered, and are arriving tomorrow. They’re a palette I’ve never seen before, quietly beautiful and exactly what I wanted.
And I am trying to integrate that lesson too: that I’m allowed to want things. That I’m allowed to bring beauty into my own life.
That it’s okay, actually, to want something lovely and to stand up for myself in the same week without expecting any kind of divine retribution.
Maybe if I keep catching these code-rewrites in real time — naming them, writing them, integrating them — my system will eventually stop sounding the alarm.
Maybe one day it won’t feel so astonishing when life hands me a small victory.
Maybe, eventually, it’ll even feel normal.
Maybe. That part is between me and whatever gods handle nervous systems.
What is up to me is the work. The practice: noticing when the old code is wrong, saying it out loud, writing it down, nudging the system a millimeter in a different direction.
Choosing, again and again, not to run the same script.
So I’m doing that. Out loud, on the page, one tiny recalibration at a time.
Thanks for reading.