Giving people a chance

Over time I stopped being an elitist. When you are hard on yourself you are hard on others which is realized once you drop the weight you are carrying. Human defense mechanisms are easier for me to spot now except that acknowledging your own can be extremely difficult when you are sporting blinders.

My father was a highly educated and exacting intellectual and my mother the product of critical parents and that combination seemed to feed into helping me hide my core identity. If I wasn't allowed to be who I was then I could at least criticize the flaws of the "great unwashed".

This turned out to be a mistake and I now remain loyal to my principles while giving people a chance to show me who they really are beyond the mask they wear for the world. If there is genuine goodness there it will eventually make itself known in a myriad of ways.

We give people a chance but as a prerequisite we first do the same for ourselves.