I wanted to blame something external.
A child abuse and in the end, the kid (Megan) passed away…and the details that came up in the papers…the kind that lodges in you and won’t leave. I’m not going to retell it. The details aren’t the point, and turning a real person’s worst moment into content is not what I’m here to do.
What I couldn’t stop chewing on was the how.
How does a person end up there? Because nobody wakes up one morning and decides to become the worst version of themselves. It doesn’t arrive in a day. It accumulates. And the longer I sat with it, the more I realised the mechanism isn’t exotic at all. It’s the same one running quietly in me, in you, in everyone — most days completely harmlessly. That’s what made it hard to look at.
It starts with a sentence that sounds entirely reasonable:
“I know better than the teacher.”
A little later:
“My mother doesn’t understand.”
Then, eventually:
“No one will care if I handle it my way.”
Read those three lines again.
Notice that not one of them feels like a crime. Each one is just — confidence. Independence. A man trusting his own judgment. The first time I read them back, I heard my own voice in all three.
That’s the trap.
The early rungs of the ladder are invisible from the inside, because they don’t look like corruption. They look like competence.
Here’s the progression, stripped down:
You rationalise — I know better.
Then you isolate — you stop running things past the people who’d push back, because they “don’t get it.”
Then comes silence — no contradiction reaches you anymore, because you’ve quietly removed everyone who’d offer it.
Then the heart hardens — not in a dramatic moment, but slowly, the way a callus forms. By the time the result is visible to the world, it’s load-bearing. You’ve built your whole life on top of the lie.
The terrifying part isn’t the monster at the end of the road. It’s that the first lie is always the one you tell yourself — and you tell it because it’s comfortable, not because you’re evil.
So the real question wasn’t “how could someone do that.”
It’s: where am I running the early version of this right now? Where have I decided I know better and quietly stopped checking?
Because that’s the only version of this story I have any control over.
Here is the inverse I try to build, on purpose.
I engineer people who can contradict me.
Not yes-men — people with the standing to tell me I’m wrong, and a relationship strong enough that I’ll actually hear it. My wife. A few men I trust. A small council I run hard decisions through, precisely so that my own judgment is never the only voice in the room.
I treat the urge to go quiet — to stop explaining myself, to “just handle it my way” without telling anyone — as a warning light, not a sign of strength. The moment I notice I don’t want anyone to know how I’m thinking about something, that is exactly the thing I drag into the light.
And underneath all of it: I’m answerable. Accountable.
Not only to people who might find out, but to God, who already sees the part I’d hide. A heart only hardens when nothing is allowed to soften it. Staying answerable is how you keep it soft.
None of this is heroic. It’s maintenance. The man who stays correctable isn’t morally superior — he’s just refused the first comfortable lie, the small one, the no one will care one. He’s kept open the door the other man quietly closed.
That’s the whole discipline. Don’t close the door.
So watch the three sentences. When you hear yourself say I know better, they don’t understand, no one will care — that’s not the end of the story.
It’s the beginning of one. You still get to decide which one.