I’ve been thinking on and off about a note of Katherine’s that I saw, after she died, in which she commented, “I know I’m a difficult person.” If I remember right, this was by way of her explaining why maybe we all really would be better off without her.
I wanted to shout then (and apparently still want to shout now, since I’m posting this), that we’re all difficult people, every last one one of us. We’re all imperfect, we’re all muddling through, we’re all unfair to each other at times. We all handle the stresses of life with less grace than our inner visions of who we really want to be.
And one part of that is that of course we should always try to become better. I believe becoming better is always possible; more and more I think that if Katherine had believed it, too, maybe she wouldn’t have killed herself, regardless of the other stresses in her life.
But I also think we have a right to be difficult. A right to be imperfect, to try to be better and fail, to keep trying in different ways and maybe keep failing. We might not have a right to be complacent about our failings; but we have a right to have them.
We’re all difficult, one way or another. And we all have a right to be here, difficult as we are.