Those are easy to merge. The company is frustrating me, therefore the person representing the company becomes the target.
I did not want to do that. I made a point of separating his effort from the system’s limitations. And then the irony landed. That was exactly what I had wished Walmart had done for me. Separate the human being from the mistake.
I had experienced what it felt like when that separation failed, and then I found myself deliberately making the separation for somebody else. I remember thinking, Well, damned if I do, damned if I don’t. If Walmart had handled everything beautifully, I might never have learned this so sharply.
But even there, another correction mattered. The learning did not justify the harm. Something poorly handled does not become good because I extracted something valuable from it. That sentence protected me from a very seductive kind of gratitude. I do not need to thank the wound for teaching me anatomy. I can simply learn anatomy.
The harm and the learning are separate truths. Walmart could have handled me better. And I became better at seeing the person inside a system. Both. That is not cosmic justice. It is what I did next.
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