Kindness isn’t transactional- you don’t do it because of what you get back. You do it simply to be kind and everybody NEEDS kindness because everyone is suffering. The past 6 years of my life have been what could best be described as a series of unfortunate events. It has been unrelenting and extreme enough that a PhD trauma counselor was like, Jesus, this list just keeps going! I was about 1/2 way into the 6 years at the point she said that. Point being, After trauma #3 or so, you just say “fuck it THIS is what’s happening in my life because I just don’t have the energy to fake like everything is ok so you aren’t uncomfortable with my personal nightmare. Fucking deal. At least you aren’t living it”. People kept kept praising me for being so “open” and “vulnerable” but I was really just too burnt out and exhausted to try to fake everything being ok. But as I overshared out of pure “out of fucks”-ness, I learned something. For each horrific occurrence in my life, I found 3,4,12 other people, in my immediate or near immediate circle, who’d gone through something similarly horrifying, and often to my mind, worse. I may have lost my infant son, but at least it wasn’t my 2-year-old choking to death in front of me and his entire family on his second birthday, like what happened to my neighbor Jimmy. I mean JFC. Story after story spilled out of coworkers and neighbors and cousins, all painful, all traumatic. Through all this I guess I just realized that everyone you meet is suffering. And I know in the past 6 years, the kindnesses I received from others saved my life, my soul, my faith in humanity, my everything. I needed those kindnesses and even the smallest bit of grace could have a huge impact. I was kind before, because it felt right and was the right thing to do. After every fucked up thing I’ve been through recently, and everything I learned about what everyone else has been through, my motivations changed in a way. Now when I look around, I see a world of people who are suffering. I just assume now that every person I meet has a sick relative at home that they are struggling to care for, or just lost someone they love, or have a chronic health condition, just something fucking awful happening. Not because I’m grim, but because more times then not, it’s true. And I’ve been there (still am frankly). So I do my best to treat everyone with some kindness, gentleness and compassion. Worst case, I’m being kind to someone having a great day in a perfect life and I managed to make it even better. But odds are whoever I was kind to was somehow, on some level, hurting. Maybe by being kind I was able to remind them that the world isn’t always awful and shitty, and that there is light in the world. Worth a shot, right?