Sometimes this happens:

• You’re worried that you’ve done a bad thing.
• Or that you’re going to do a bad thing
• And you go to someone for help thinking through it
• And they say “Oh, no, you’re not the kind of person who would do that.”

That’s not a good thing to take for an answer, because there aren’t kinds of people who do bad things and kinds of people who don’t. Everyone does bad things sometimes. It’s really important to keep that in mind, and to actively work on noticing and fixing it.

Doing right by others is a skill. One you always have to keep working on. Not an innate attribute.

If you’re worried that you’ve done wrong, don’t let someone tell you that you’re not the kind of person who would do such a thing. When you’re worried about the possibility of hurting people, what matters is to figure out what you are actually doing. It’s not a referendum on what kind of person you are. It’s about what you do, and how to make what you do good.