storytime:
when I was a child, my dad was extremely cruel in a lot of ways. I remember trying to empathize with him and being terrified because he didn't seem 'aware' of the pain he was doing, even though the signs were there.
This was terrifying because -

when i imagined being my dad, i realized that it 'felt good', in the sense that there was no sense of being wrong. He felt like a victim, persecuted and hurt by others - and this was *exactly how I felt*. I felt like he was hurting me, and like he shouldn't be.
2/

So from an early age I struggled a lot with the paranoia that I was really cruel and hurting a lot of other people, because I saw that cruel people *felt as correct as I did*. A lot of my attention went to trying to figure out how I could tell - from the inside, how do you know 3

if you're being cruel to others?
And I realized that to be different from my dad, I needed to stop using "you hurt me" as a justification to hurt other people back. That no matter the pain someone caused me, I needed to hold their humanity in mind and care for them. 4/

This has deeply informed my entire worldview from a pretty young age, and I think is why I'm so repulsed by a lot of the political discourse happening now. So much of it are righteous justifications of hurting other people due to how they've been hurt. I get the appeal, but 5/

these people are utterly failing to empathize with the people who hurt them - and empathizing with people who hurt you is how you learn what it's like to be a cruel person, and thus how to avoid being that yourself.
6/6