I’ve been thinking for a little bit about how I want to approach this subject and I know that there are friends of mine that really want me to back burner this and not really bring it to light.

I can understand their line of thought on this and it is, if anything, a tad bit controversial, but I feel like it’s something that we really don’t speak about because for whatever reason certain professions are viewed as not being able to have faults.

As one of the nuns that I used to have as a teacher once said, there was only one perfect person. That sentiment is correct—and the one perfect person is not any of us. When we deal with these particular situations, we expect certain professions to be without flaw. For example, I have seen many a mental health professional hide their mental health conditions because quite simply they’re not supposed to have them. We expect people to be perfect and immune to any kind of outside influence, and it’s just not true.

I am in no way excusing bad behavior, but everyone has those skeletons or issues in their closet. There’s no way around it. Some people are very able to hide or suppress their problems, and that’s great—good on them. However, there are plenty of professionals that fuck up. Granted, there are certain circumstances where a fuck up shouldn’t be tolerated. The problem here is that we set such a broad scope of things that shouldn’t be tolerated that it’s very easy to just throw away a good professional because of a misjudgment or two. Obviously there are some hard fast legal rules that we would expect everyone to abide by.

There are also those fuck ups that occur where the person realizes that it is a problem and seeks help for it. I know I had a problem and had a very tough time finding an avenue to say, “Look, I know this isn’t right—how do I get help?” Believe it or not, there are programs that help people who self-report, continue in their profession, and get the treatment that they need. When someone doesn’t know that this kind of program exists, they hide the problem until it blows up. Now that doesn’t mean that it’s a freebie and you can do it every time, but it does say, “Hey look, I know I fucked up and I want help,” and then we move forward with the help and (hopefully) never sin again, I guess.

We all know that nothing will make the news faster than a doctor or a lawyer or a judge doing something bad. Everyone immediately freaks out because this particular person is not what society’s view of a person of that stature would be. Yet every year many of those respected professions fall ill of the guidelines. Some of them do it deliberately and some of them fall into them by accident.

As is so popular these days, something bad happens and that person immediately needs to lose their job and their livelihood as some sort of solution to this problem. Again, I agree—there are circumstances where people need to lose their job, no matter what.

So I ask you, dear reader: why is there constantly a “blood oath” mentality in society today? It is an automatic thing, and yet that really doesn’t solve the problem except by removing the person from that position. Again, why? And it goes through really all occupations—that it’s a necessity. I fail to see that attitude doing anything but causing problems to be repressed, not resolved.

I follow a lot of TikToks where the influencer sees bad behavior and basically calls their followers to demand action by the person’s employer, even when they are not identifying themselves as part of that company or profession. Should there be consequences in a lot of situations? Yes. But killing somebody’s job is a little extreme in some cases.

I know I’ve used the caveat of: there are cases where employment should be affected or legal repercussions should happen, and that is because—for the third time if you didn’t hear it the first two—there are some circumstances that violate societal norms. But societal norms need to take into account some level of compassion, and honestly I think this country lost its sense of compassion years ago. The line that comes to mind in all this is: we need to do better. The problem is that we think doing better means we need to increase this type of behavior versus show compassion for people with bad behavior. It is honestly one thing that just hurts any profession and, admittedly, it’s hurt me.

I think that that feeling of being hurt comes from the fact that I feel like I’m still a good guy—I just screwed up. I feel like basically being told, “Well, you’re done,” has caused me to take this feeling of the over-the-top response to this, which has made me feel like I’m a bad person. And even the way I was treated after all of this—people basically calling me a bad person. I know I’m not a bad person. I can tell myself a hundred times I’m not a bad person, but the other part of my mind says, “Yeah, you are a bad person.”

Oh well. Enough of that. At least my dog and my mom don’t think I’m a bad person.