Blame Is a Dead End
What happened may not be your fault, but what you do next is always yours.
A storm comes through in the night, and your neighbor’s old tree falls across your fence. It’s not your fault, not even a little. It was their tree, and it was the storm. You could spend the whole morning working out exactly whose fault it is, and you might be right. Meanwhile there’s a hole in your fence, the dog is looking at it, and being right won’t fill it.
That’s most of this letter in one scene. What happened may not be your fault. What you do next is always yours.
I want to be careful here, because people sometimes hear “own it” as “it’s your fault.” Some things that happen to you will be truly unfair. Someone will lie to you. You’ll get sick. A choice made far above you will cost you a job. I’m not asking you to pretend otherwise, or to carry blame that isn’t yours. Fault and the next move are two different questions. Anyone can argue about the first one. Only you can answer the second.
This is rule four again, with rules three and five close behind.
First, rule four. You can only push now. Blame is a question about the past. Sometimes it’s a fair question that needs an answer, like when you need your money back, or need to make sure a thing doesn’t happen again. Ask it, get the answer, and use it. But once you have the answer, asking again doesn’t push on anything. The fence stays broken. The only push left is the next one.
Second, rule three. Whatever you feed, grows, and blame is very easy to feed. Each time you tell the story of who did this to you, the story gets a little smoother and a little louder. Telling it to someone who can help is good. Telling it to yourself for the hundredth time at two in the morning is feeding it. Fed long enough, a story like that can become the main thing you know about yourself. Then you’ve lost twice. Once to whatever happened, and again to all the time you spent on it.
Third, rule five. The world gets the last word, and it answers what you do, not who’s to blame. The moment you ask “what now?” you can start testing things. Prop something across the gap for tonight. Call someone who fixes fences. Knock on your neighbor’s door and make a plan together. Some of it won’t work. That’s fine, because each try tells you something. Blame can only tell you the same thing again.
Owning the next move isn’t the same as blaming yourself. If anything, it’s the way out of blaming yourself. You can be completely blameless and still be the only one who can pick up the phone. And when you do, notice how it feels. Doing one small thing, even a thing that doesn’t work, feels different from waiting.
Try this for a week.
Listen for one kind of sentence in your own head: “I can’t, because of what happened.” When you catch one, write it down. Then write it again with a new start: “Given that it happened, my next move is…” Finish it with something small enough to do by tomorrow, and then do it. You don’t have to like the new sentence. Just make the move, and see what the world says back.
One line to remember
Fault looks back. Your next move looks forward. Only one of them is yours to make.
