After decades of complex trauma running my life—and more treatment programs than I can politely list—I left a residential program and looked at my country the way I had once looked at myself.

I saw a nation stuck in the same kind of hell I had adapted to: pain wrapped in performance. People torn between two main efforts, but no one actually caring for the individual. Just a constant, frantic pointing at what “should” be different, instead of doing anything different.

In recovery there’s a saying: “nothing good comes from “should-ing” all over the place.” There’s no way around it, the world “should” be nothing. What exists and continues to exist is no more than what we make or allow. That’s the definition of proactiveness alongside the responsibility to be dignified. It is absolutely no different than my years of blaming the world for how I shouldn’t be struggling with my issues and endlessly expecting different results as if that’s a progressive line to be drawn. The reality is this: regardless to how much reason I had to keep being dysfunctional, or anyone’s reason to harbor anger…it doesn’t change history how we think it “should”, not in the medium or long run. No, instead self-glorification occurs…something that feels incredible for a day at best, and then it quietly turns into self-horror. It may take a while to see it, but pent-up anger always goes sour. Ask the Sith, the Devil, any credible therapist, or anyone who’s been protected by a system for years and then finally had to watch themselves on mainstream news do something awful.

What I’m referring to is the understanding I finally had full realized of actual accountability. The thing that isn’t all or nothing, but has two shades: fault or blame. You can accidentally step on an ant hill and be accountable…and in consequence is “fault”. Did you intend to? No? Then you aren’t to blame. This is paramount in accepting oneself and others to belong anywhere. It doesn’t require religion or loyalty to a party. It just requires that we stop pretending our pain is special and start being honest about it in a way that doesn’t separate us from any involvement.

And Further, I saw how we demonize each other for actions as though it is their entire existence, forgetting that the whole premise of forgiveness is seeing the difference between behavior, ideologies and human life. And, ultimately, I realized that actual forgiveness doesn’t run out…it’s the enduring the performance of “forgiveness” that we can only tolerate for so long, as it should for it’s not genuine absolve.

Instead of any real understanding, what usually happens is everything gets pushed into “inhuman” territory, as if the problems are too big or too abstract to fix. The ideology becomes contagious—because we’ve made it so. It’s socially shameful to have anything be genuinely “dysfunctional,” because it can’t be framed to look just right on social media… unless someone’s care and compassion for others can be exploited. “I am giving/donating/ caring…” has only become worth saying if it can be noticed.

So we get moments where people repeat that “the system is broken” and, seconds later, talk like they know what America truly is. The truth is, a nation like America literally can’t be spoken for by any one person. That’s the whole point of democracy, equality, and civil decency in the first place.

How can anyone say—especially without ever asking a single other person—that they know what America is? What it means to them, absolutely they should say loudly! But that’s almost never how it’s framed. I was enlisted in the military and, even knowing how much sexism and racism lived in the minds of the founding generation (and absolutely persists), I still wouldn’t dare to claim I speak on behalf of the whole nation. The dead don’t get a vote today, and we don’t get to use their names as a shortcut for actually listening to each other now.

Here’s the part that gets me…if people who want to be racist, or sexist or oppressive in any way just came out with it and we handled it appropriately we’d give them a place to be that way, all by their lonesome. and guess what: i absolutely guarantee within one generation of them by themselves without the thing they hate, finally away from it and just themselves to praise in highest regards…it would be gone. seriously, think about it, when has anyone been prejudiced on something, got rid of it and that was it; full contentment?

I don’t claim my pain—or anyone else’s—is greater or lesser. That comparison game is exactly what kept me sick for years. I only know this: once I stopped treating my pain as exceptional and started treating it as human, could (not should) I finally heal. Not because I had to, not because it was life or death, but because I spent months and months tearing down everything I thought was needed to belong and then defining and establishing my own core values that are never negotiable.

Initially, I wanted all the values—all the things to ascertain “goodliness” and release me from the harm I had caused and felt would keep happening. But I quickly found that isn’t logical or efficient in truly developing anything worthwhile.

So I took a step back and realized that, with actual dedication, only a few values are needed to eventually become precisely what I knew I wanted to be. How? Because patience blooms tolerance with practice. Compassion allows breathing room for empathy to flourish. And most of all, forgiving myself is the very soil from which anything can successfully grow.

It was in that moment it became clear that I kept failing to be who I knew I was capable of being because I was lacking foundational traits. I only understood the definitions of those traits, not how to really embody them in my behavior or in how I reacted to life’s critically defining moments.

But it didn’t stop there. I saw all the unnecessary conflicts as weeds that stand as tall as a redwood all across the world: so many chances for humility instead of performance, knowing the difference between having a gun versus understanding guns, for justice instead of manipulative court charades, for humanity instead of corporate dehumanization, for accountability instead of assaults made out of victimizations…and, utmost, for shared safety instead of a claim to exclusively deserve safe belonging.

These I now saw as things in short supply. People don’t desperately act out of humanity’s interest unless it feels threatened and needs to stockpile however necessary to survive. Just the same, in my active addictions I was desperately holding on to what recovery was threatening. It might sound crazy to those who have never struggled with such things, but a healthy, “normal” life can be hard to adopt, to exhibit, and to let all those things adapted to survive be abandoned. In fact, I now see it makes perfect sense to be conditioned one way and then struggle to go another.

Because, well…when you strip away all that identification, it truly is just conditioned pain left to be seen as undeserved, yet demanded a deserved recognition.

In my opinion, one of the top examples of America’s issues with healthcare is in the understanding that generally only those who are traumatized enough to willingly seek help receive the very things that teach what it means to be a truly good person within a society—things like cognitive behavioral training and its remarkable subdivision, dialectical behavioral therapy—and yet society shames and labels them through senses of superiority, as though that’s what a healthy-minded person who doesn’t need behavioral therapy would do!

This is why I speak of values and see on people’s faces, “Maybe you needed to care about values, but I…,” while the broader picture shows such dysfunction and surrender to systems that I can’t help but recall my own complete lack of self-awareness.

Liberty Shore is my way of offering that same possibility—the possibility of seeing and moving past our (thought to be) individual struggles—to a larger body: to a country, to a culture, to whoever is willing to stop “should-ing” themselves and others and start practicing something different and worthwhile.

With that, to one and all: with compassion, forgiveness, patience, and tolerance, I genuinely appreciate you being here and, if you’re willing to share it, I see your pain.

— Christopher J. Perger