On the difference between staying inside the wound and allowing something softer to emerge from it.
Aunty bell says, ‘Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.’ — All About Love
I have been thinking about what it means to be accountable inside that communion. Turning it over slowly. Thinking about what accountability means when healing is tied to other people. When it happens in relationship.
Accountability that is grounded.
Accountability that lets you stand fully in what you have done and still remain whole enough to repair.
Accountability that honours truth without turning it into something that wounds again.
I don’t believe people are only the worst thing they have done. I don’t believe harm disappears because someone meant well either.
Restorative justice, the kind of religion that centres love over retribution, human rights frameworks, and feminism have all shaped how I understand relationships. They shape how I try, albeit, imperfectly, to do the work of getting 1% better every day.
The person who has been harmed holds the right to speak.
To name what happened. They get to describe what it did to them.
That naming is part of the work.
Too many of us spent years swallowing things whole because the people around us were more committed to comfort than truth.
But I also think something happens when we stop seeing accountability as a living process and start treating it like a fixed identity someone must wear forever.
I have been thinking a lot about how easy it is for people to become flattened inside pain. One person becomes innocent. One person becomes monstrous. One person gets frozen inside the worst moment of their life while everybody else gets to remain complicated.
We are not singular events; we are made up of choices and experiences, of wounds and what we have done with them.
That kind of flattening scares me because I know how human beings are made.
None of us came here clean.
Most of us inherited ways of loving that already had violence folded into them. Silence. Control. Manipulation. Ego. Possession. Shame. We learned how to wound each other before we learned how to speak honestly about being wounded ourselves.
Some people repeat what hurt them.
Some people disappear inside it.
Some people become obsessed with never being wrong because being wrong once cost them too much.
And some people hurt others while still believing themselves to be good.
I think accountability begins there — in the ugly private confrontation with yourself.
What in me made this possible?
Not just: what did I do?
But: what allowed me to do it and still remain disconnected from its impact?
That is harder work.
It is slower work too.
I don’t think accountability lives in one apology. I think it lives in patterns. In whether someone becomes more honest. More self-aware. Less entitled to other people’s emotional labour. Less committed to protecting the version of themselves they prefer over the truth of who they have been.
Most change is quiet.
It happens in restraint. In therapy. In uncomfortable conversations. In recognising the moment before you repeat an old behaviour and choosing differently this time.
I think people deserve to be allowed that process.
Because if nobody is allowed to become different, then we are admitting that punishment is the only thing we actually understand.
And I know punishment. Most of us do.
Punishment is familiar. It is immediate. It creates clarity fast. Somebody is wrong. Somebody else is right. The story settles quickly after that.
But human beings are never simple.
I keep thinking about how anger settles in the body. How it changes posture. Breathing. Memory. I think some people carry hurt so long that it begins to feel identical to identity. Letting go of it can feel like betrayal. Sometimes rage is the only thing that kept someone alive long enough to survive what happened to them.
I understand that too.
Still, I think there is a difference between refusing reconciliation and refusing complexity.
One protects you.
The other can turn another human being into an object you no longer feel responsible for seeing clearly.
That distinction matters to me.
Because accountability asks for truth, but truth without context becomes spectacle very quickly. Human beings are not headlines. We are not singular moments. We are accumulations. Contradictions. Histories. Wounds. Choices. Repetitions.
And I think community has responsibilities too. To remain invested in whether people are capable of becoming less harmful over time.
I don’t know what justice looks like without that.
I don’t know what healing becomes if nobody believes transformation is possible.
Some people will never want conversation after harm. That is their right. Some wounds close around silence because silence feels safer than reopening anything.
But I also think we should say plainly when what is being sought is consequence rather than transformation.
Those are not the same thing.
Transformation is slow. Humbling. Repetitive. It asks people to sit inside shame without letting shame become the whole story. It asks people to stay present long enough to understand themselves differently.
A lot of people never get there.
Sometimes because they are unwilling.
Sometimes because the people around them are more invested in permanence than change.
Sometimes because the harm was too deep to survive relationally.
All of that is real.
But I cannot pretend that accountability means reducing people to ash and calling the smoke healing.
I don’t believe in that kind of righteousness anymore.
There is enough breaking in the world already.
What interests me now is whether people can tell the truth and still leave room for something human to remain after it.
We are all capable of causing harm.
We are all capable of being harmed.
So when the aim is healing, there is a responsibility in how we treat each other.
There is work to do.
There is always work to do.
But it has to be the kind of work that builds something.
Not just the kind that breaks.
