“Was this my fault?”

Yes.

No.

Is it your fault that your liver is failing you? Is it your fault you came to a foreign country for a better life and found no opportunity to support yourself? That you drank because you didn’t have access to mental health care? That you developed an addiction and didn’t know how to stop? Is it your fault that your body responded this way? And now you have to endure the puncture of a needle every other day just to quell the growing pressure of in your stomach and relieve some of pain. You can’t go home to see your family and can’t get a hold of them to let them know what was going on.

Is it your fault that your lungs are failing? Is it your fault that a corporate conglomerate pushed addictive substances into the market only thinking of money and not the health of the people who were buying their products? Is it your fault that the only neighborhood where you could find housing has air quality that makes you cough the second you step out the door? Is it your fault the minute clinic doctors sent you off with an as-needed inhaler? That you couldn’t get a doctor’s appointment for a true work up because your work won’t let you off? And now you have to stop every 2 blocks to take a breath. You’re suffering from one of the most preventable diseases in the world, but it’s too far gone for you to truly ever run after your grandkids like you always dreamed of doing.

Is it your fault your sugars are up, and your vision is starting to blur, and you feel pins and needles in your feet every moment of the day? Is it your fault there are no grocery stores with fresh produce in a 15-block radius? Is it your fault that your mother and her father and his mother before all had the same disease? And you tried to work out and lose weight and even try that fancy new medicine the world has been buzzing about, but they told you it’ll be thousands of dollars that you don’t have? And now the doctor is telling you the best she can do is control the damage that’s already been done.  And your teenage kids are wondering if this is their fate too.

What do you say? Were there choices along the way you could have made differently? There always are. Was the world around you set up in order to make you fail? In a way, it was. Was it all inevitable? I don’t know.

For me, as far as I’m concerned, it’s not your fault. The game of blame and shame helps no one now. The choices we made in our past are only useful in that they can guide our future. Understanding how the world set us up to fail only allows us to understand how to beat the world at its own game. Is it fair? No. Can we go back? Impossible. Can we radically shift the world so that starting today, this never happens again? Unlikely.

“Was this my fault?”

Does that really even matter now…