The world isn’t divided into sinners and saints, and our brains seem to have as much trouble actually processing that as they do with very large numbers. We say people are complex but we can’t actually deal with their complexity up close.

You know, in your bones, this complexity if you have loved and been loved by someone who abused you. It seems like there is no way forward except to either be gaslit by them (they loved me, so they cannot actually have abused me) or by yourself (the abuse was real, therefore the love was not).

Our brains love binaries, as humans, so it feels like it has to be one or the other—they were a monster, or we loved each other. Either the abuse is excusable or the love was false.

Complete healing as opposed to scarring is understanding that both can be true simultaneously. Most survivors don’t get there, because the steadiest place from which to undo abuser gaslighting is “they were a monster and they didn’t love me.”

A lot of guys who want to be good guys have women in their lives who have been harmed by rape and it hurts them to see and so they say things like “I would beat anyone I found out was a rapist bloody.” And then they can’t see the way their brother coerces their sister-in-law.

Because they know him and they love him and it isn’t the obvious violence they imagine and they know he is capable of love because he loves them. He is not a monster, and thus can’t do monstrous things.

I’ve listened to so many true crime podcasts and I fall off all of them because the hosts inevitably want the world to be monsters, heroes, and victims, and can’t conceive of suffering, or mental incapacity, on the part of “monsters” and want to see punishment.

Seeing this small impulse to hurt as akin to this greater one to torture. Not because most of us would actually kidnap and torture anyone, but because it is worth understanding, starting with self-examination, why any human would ever want to harm another human.

It’s necessary for understanding why America is where it is at this particular moment. It’s necessary for authentic relationships with other people and not just script-following. It’s necessary to see people and not projections.

And the flipside of seeing little surges of monstrosity in ourselves and other “normal” people means seeing normality and insight and yes, the capacity to make worthy things, in “monsters.”

You don’t have to hate art that moves you because the artist did something awful. I think you have a responsibility not to provide them with further profits, while they live, but buying more art is not the same as being moved by art, gaining value from it.

And I think it’s actually worth engaging more, and more deeply, with art that moved you, after you find out the artist did something awful. It’s worth understanding *why* you loved it. It’s easy to treat it as radioactive, to flatten it and flatten the artist.

But that’s also retreating to safety you might not need. It’s worth asking what you loved, either because it forces you to deal with human complexity, or because you might learn something about yourself.

Did this art by someone who turned out to be some sort of supremacist make you feel superior? Did it make you feel justified in dismissing others as inferior? That’s worth interrogating.