The Human Mind Is Not Infallible
“And but so,” he continued, “I need a favor. I need you to talk to her. She doesn’t get it. She can’t see it from my point of view - I just want her back, man, I love her and it’s not fair of her to leave me like this, Jim, it’s just not fair. Everything was right, and now it’s not - it’s fucked up and shitty and I need someone to help me fix it and I don’t know who else to turn to.
“And it’s not like I did anything wrong, either, man, and I need to stress that, because you know me well enough to know that I’m not a violent guy - I’m passive. She’s telling everyone I gave her that black eye, and I had nothing to do with it. It hurts me, man, that she’d tell people all of this shit about me, and I can’t figure out why she’s doing it, and I just want it to stop. I just want her back. I just want everything back.”
—
“You just don’t get it,” she continued, “do you? You’re just assuming that he was in the right, and I get that, I do - you’ve known him longer, you know him better. Trust me, Jim, he’s a fucking psychopath. He tried to rape me. Did he tell you that? We were in the parking lot of the mall. He punched me in the face, threw me onto the ground and tried to fucking rape me. You can’t seriously take his side in this. You can’t. I’ve still got the bruises he left.
“And yes, I loved him, and yes, I probably still do love him, but he got violent with me once and that means he’ll get violent again. He’s a nasty drunk, we both know it, and I’ll just… I’ll never be able to trust him. How could I? He tried to rape me. He did. I found video from the mall security cameras on YouTube, Jim - some asshole security guard uploaded it instead of taking it to the cops. Do you really need to see this video? Do you? I’m going to show you the video.”
—
The issue is as follows:
1.) There is a couple. They are David and Karen.
a.) David and Karen are in love.
2.) You are friends with both David and Karen - you introduced them, actually, several years ago. You never intended for them to fall in love, but you were pleasantly surprised when they did.
a.) David may very well be your best friend in the entire world.
b.) There is a distinct possibility that you are in love with Karen.
I.) Karen seems to be attracted to you, but there’s no way of knowing, because she would never betray David.
3.) An altercation occurs between David and Karen.
a.) David tells you that he is innocent.
I.) He may be lying to you, he may actually believe this. There is no way to tell.
b.) Karen has undeniable, video evidence that he is not, in fact, innocent.
4.) Reconciliation is impossible. David has lost Karen’s trust forever.
And so you have two options.
1.) Support David. Karen abandons you, slanders your name, but you keep your best friend.
2.) Support Karen. In order to do this, you would have to abandon David, to appease her.
a.) This may lead to a relationship, some day, maybe, you hope.
The question is as follows:
1.) What do you do?
—
It’s shocking, in a way, how your mind will stretch and bend reality to protect its perception of the people you care about. I wanted to believe David. I wanted to mend his relationship, bring my best friends back together again - even after talking to Karen and seeing the grainy video and knowing - knowing - that David had done something really, really fucked up this time, I still wanted to defend him. I wanted to help him. I actually struggled with the decision - over which friend I should support - for a long time. It’s almost disgusting, in retrospect, how long it took me to decide. At the time I was so worried about what David thought of me I couldn’t bring myself to condemn him.
And, of course, when I did finally end our friendship, I got exactly the reaction I was scared of. He literally broke down and cried, right there in front of me. “Jim,” he said, “Jim, I’ve lost everything else. My reputation, the love of my life. I’m broken. You can’t leave me. I can’t lose my best friend, too. I don’t know what I’ll do. I’ll go crazy.”
And what could I say? “It doesn’t matter, David, you tried to rape her.” “I’m sorry, David, but it’s best for everyone involved.” “It’s going to be okay, man, you’ll get through it somehow.”There was nothing to say. So I didn’t. I turned around and I walked away. We didn’t really speak again, after that.
—
It later came out - much later, months later, after it was far too late to do anything about it - that David truly didn’t believe he had done anything to Karen, that he was truly hurt by her accusations, that he didn’t understand why she was doing these things to him or why everyone had believed her. Even after he was shown the video by a mutual friend, he just assumed it was two other people. “Sure, they kind of look like us,” he said, “but it’s grainy and low resolution and black and white and that could be anyone and anywhere in the world.” And sure, he was right, I suppose - it’s totally possible that two other people somewhere else in the world who looked remarkably similar to Karen and David went through something similar to what she claimed, and she found the video and took advantage of the situation to get out of the relationship and hurt David. It’s possible. It’s also extraordinarily unlikely.
From what I’ve pieced together over the years, here’s what happened:
David and Karen went to a party. They got really, really drunk. They walked to the mall to get away from everyone else. Karen stopped drinking, but David continued. David blacked out - maybe he drank too much, maybe there was a bad reaction with some of his medication. Maybe he was crazy - he might’ve gotten that from his mother. Whatever the case, when he was blacked out, he tried to rape Karen. She fought him off, and he woke up the next day in his own bed, hungover, no memory of what he had done or how he had gotten home.
It makes me wonder. The human mind is far from infallible. I went to bed that night, after I had abandoned David, and I thought about it. Was he innocent? He hadn’t remembered the crime. He wasn’t himself when he committed the crime. It was like another soul inhabited his body and did some very, very bad things to another person - it was his body, but not his mind. Does that make David guilty? Was it his fault?
More importantly it made me question my perceptions of my own actions. In my own mind I’m usually in the right, but does that reflect reality? I’ve been accused of things in the past, things I know I didn’t do, but what if I did do them? What if I’m not nearly as innocent as I believe I am ? And how do I atone for those crimes that I committed but didn’t realize or don’t remember? How can I truly be a good person when, in the end, I can’t really trust my own perception of reality?
I fell asleep thinking about these questions, scared, worried about what they meant for my future, and I woke the next morning wondering what had become of the world I stood upon only hours before.
