Comment by lubujackson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lubujackson | Hacker News Reader

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The author should know that this attitude does absolutely nothing for anyone.

Throwing blame back on other people for not understanding your hardships is self-serving and a fundamentally dismissive attitude. Mental issues do not absolve actions. You feel that you are not fully responsible for your actions and that is actually fine - but as a person who caused harm you should own your ACTIONS, full stop.

"I fucked up. I had a mental break and caused hurt to others.I am sorry for those actions and I am working to better handle my mental issues."

Since they ask at the end what people want, it is simply that. Accept that you are the person that did these acts and hurt others. Forgive yourself for doing it, (internally) but don't deny responsibility.

If it helps, blame your Public Self for being an asshole while your True Self can empathize with those hurt by Public Self. Right now you can't empathize because you are so concerned about deflecting blame from yourself. But blame is shitty and doesn't help anything - ignore blame and accept responsibility for your actions.

Things can't improve until you do that first.

I believe the author did in fact say exactly this.

> I did something very wrong, and the complication of my mental disorder should not excuse me entirely from blame for those actions. The degree to which any individual weighs that complication will have to be a matter of their individual ethical sense. Everyone has the right to make up their own mind about whether I should be forgiven or not. These issues are very complex, and I have had to wrestle with my culpability for my actions when manic for a long time. It’s not easy. It’s perfectly legitimate to weigh my mental illness as context and still conclude that I deserve to have social ties severed. I did in fact lose some real friends over what happened, they made their decisions in full light of my condition and history, and I can only respect that stance and hope that one day they might reconsider.

> ...

> I have not asked for absolution; I have asked for forgiveness. I have asked for forgiveness knowing that only guilty people have the right to ask such a thing. I am guilty of doing something terrible, and I know that some will always judge me harshly for it. I cannot ask them to do otherwise if they are moved to do so by their conscience.

Amending an apology with an explanation of intent undermines the apology. Stuff like this:

> I am saying that it is a lie to say that I had a particular outcome in mind because I was operating under the antilogic of psychosis. I know because I’m me and I was there. I’m sorry if this is inconvenient for your efforts to develop simplistic moral readings about what happened, but I assure you my psychotic disorder is harder on me than it is on you...You have no idea what was happening in my brain and no right to speak as if you do.

This is the self-serving part that makes the apology meaningless to those who have been affected. It doesn't help that it is full of blaming ("it is a lie", "You have no idea") and condescending language ("I'm sorry if this is inconvenient...") This is a defense response and isn't an attempt to de-escalate the situation, respond with empathy or take any real responsibility.

If I ran over your dog with my car I wouldn't say I'm "a little bit responsible" but "actually your dog shouldn't have been running in the road", right?

> I have asked that people consider that I deserve neither total condemnation nor total exoneration.

This seems to be an admission of responsibility to me.

It seems about the weakest one possible, in that it allows accepting either only tiny amounts of responsibility, or almost total responsibility.

Maybe you don't understand how scales work. His description allows _everything between the endpoints_ he stated. How do you arrive at only a binary choice?

Did you actually read the article? The author simply asks critics to give the full context (psychological problems) when attacking the author. The author clearly takes full responsibility for their actions.

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