So you've been cancelled
The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
Marcus Aurelius
This is the beginning of a new series of writing that is meant to help coach people who have been “cancelled”, publicly shamed, or held accountable in a less than discrete way. The goal is to thread the narrow needle of taking responsibility for your mistakes and making necessary amends while still maintaining confidence and optimism in whatever future remains.
Every generation has its own social standards that get enforced and some generations choose to enforce them more stringently than others. Arguably, in the year 2023, we are in one of those eras in which holding people accountable publicly is in vogue. Like witch trials or public executions we think we need to bring down the hammer on the few for the sake of the many. Not only does it reflect our conservative nature to protect the collective from malevolent actors it demonstrates how some people can gain social status by being the righteous defender of the public good.
Everyone makes mistakes but some mistakes cross a line that collective unconscious has deemed sacred. While we must have and uphold social norms, it becomes tricky navigating what one should do when one transgresses against those norms.
Being held accountable publicly can be an incredibly embarrassing and terrifying process. You lose friends, you lose credibility, and you lose status. You may even have your very protection and physical safety threatened by forces both official and vigilante decide what to do with you.
You can find many instances where someone got “cancelled” in unfair circumstances or as an overreaction to a minor infraction. This highlights the sanctimonious and self-righteous nature of our society’s online persona. But what if you actually broke a law or a norm that most people agree was overboard? What is a person supposed to do?
Follow along as I continue to dive into the best practices of being accountable for mistakes.
The first strategy comes from the stoics like Marcus Aurelius. Your cancellation has become a giant obstacle in your path but what if that obstacle might become the exact means by which you could find a greater, higher path? What if the obstacle is in fact the way to go?
We want so badly to be without blemish and for others to see us as such, but perhaps by shedding the ego driven need for innocence one can gain a deeper understanding of the fallen nature of all man. We can look past this superficiality and develop relationships and confidence that come from a more realistically human nature. There is a wisdom and perspective that can be gained from losing everything or at least having the loss of everything threatened.
It might to early to say, but while your mistakes have hurt others and yourself more than you would have ever wished, now that it has happened you are forced to face the darkest parts of yourself and the most judgmental parts of others. It is a hell that burns hot, hot enough to scorch off the parts of you that needed to die, that needed to be reformed and reshaped. This might be the obstacle that forces you into looking into the darkest caves of your soul, in which may lie the greatest treasures.
You had demons that are no longer killing you in secret. Survive this and you will emerge stronger, wiser, and cleansed.
Bravo! So proud of you.