“I never wanted to be judged for the worst mistake I made,” I keep telling myself every time I step into the quiet, somber courtroom.
Two rows of men in yellow shirts walked inside and waited for their names to be called. The shortest of them with a face tattoo was up first.
In that moment, I felt all the versions of me were out, and I felt like an exposed nerve. I felt vulnerable. I didn’t belong there. That the mistakes I made are unforgivable to even be here.
Part of me wanted to be excused in the face of raging emotions about to explode. But another part of me stayed. With shaking hands. And trembling knees.
I am sure many of us did things we were not proud of—things that sent us to therapy, to a bar, to a hospital, or to jail.
In my line of work, I needed to learn how to practice empathy with strangers. To receive everything I can about their world in order to understand them as deeply as possible.
I needed to learn how to make myself bigger to welcome every detail about a person. No comments. No notes. No judgment.
I needed to embrace the entirety of a person. Why was he angry? What were his fears? And how he fought those fears to be here.
Every one of us walked through something difficult in order to get to where we are right now. And whatever path each of us had to go through is honorable. And I needed to acknowledge that.
I needed to remind myself that we are merely here. All beautiful. And all strange. And all complicated. And all scared. And all demanding. And all are unreasonable. And sometimes, it’s kind of horrible.
The gavel hit three times, and the man cried as he heard that it was his last day in prison.
I stood up to take my seat near the bench after my call. I felt both happy and sad.
It does not harm to embrace that I felt both ways about it. After all, I am capable of contradictions.
Before my lunch break, I couldn’t help but wonder. What was his breakfast? Did he know he was about to walk out freely that day?
