Redemption Stories Are OK
A person who has caused terrible harm and is trying to become something else is not automatically lying — but there is a right way to carry that story and a wrong way, and the difference is everything
Atma Meek | Amparo Peacemaking Project Newsletter
I want to say something that I think a lot of people in this work are afraid to say out loud.
Redemption stories are okay. They are not vanity. They are not a con. A person who has caused terrible harm and who is trying to become something else is not automatically lying, and they do not have to spend the rest of their life with their head down, apologizing, in order to be believed.
But there is a right way to carry the story and a wrong way, and the difference is not subtle. I want to try to name it, because I have gotten it wrong.
The unmaking
When I took a life, and then understood what I had done — truly understood it, not as a fact about my case but as a fact about me — I was unmade.
The rage that came out of me that day took a shape I did not know it could take. And when it was over I was left standing in front of a man I had been certain did not exist. I had always known there were people who could do such a thing. I was not one of them. That was not a belief I held consciously; it was the floor I walked on. And the floor was gone.
I remember going to my knees in grief.
Here is the part I do not get to leave out: the grief was not for the person I killed. It was for me. For the person I had believed myself to be, who was now revealed as a story I had been telling. The doctor came face to face with the monster and understood there had never been two men. There was no potion. There was no other self who took the wheel. There was only me, doing what I was apparently capable of doing.
That is the thing nobody warns you about. It would be easier if a stranger had done it. A stranger you can disown. You cannot disown yourself.
The arithmetic
What comes next is almost automatic, and it looks like virtue.
You wake up. You are horrified. And you begin to want, with an intensity that is hard to describe, to take it back. You cannot take it back — you know that in your mind — but the wanting does not care what your mind knows. So the wanting goes looking for a way, and the way it finds is arithmetic. That there is some way to erase the red in the ledger of my life.
If I can prevent enough suffering, maybe it balances.
If I can heal enough of it, maybe I settle up.
If I stand in the gap for enough people, maybe the ledger closes.
I have spent years doing that math. I do not think I am the only one. I have watched other people do it — good people, doing real work, saving lives — and underneath the good work there is a calculator running, and it never gets to zero, and it makes them frantic and then it makes them hard.
Because the math is a lie. There is no exchange rate. The suffering you prevent is not payment for the suffering you caused. It does not transfer. There is no account where one is credited against the other. You cannot cancel a deed with a deed.
And when you finally see that — really see it, the way I saw the other thing — it takes your legs out a second time. Because the good work was supposed to be the way home, and now you find out there is no home. There is just the work.
What you have instead
There is an old story about a man who murdered many people and then, in a single encounter, turned. He gave up everything he was, and he became a holy man. Genuinely. Not as a performance. He became a source of peace in a world he had spent his life terrorizing.
And when he walked through the villages afterward, people threw stones at him. He bled. He did not throw the stones back and he did not stop walking. And every person he had killed stayed dead.
That is the whole story. That is what it offers. Not absolution. Not a clean ending. A changed man, still walking, still bleeding, and the dead still dead.
I used to think that was a tragedy. Now I think it is the only honest version anybody has ever told.
Because the good is not restitution. Restitution is not on offer. The good is what you have instead of restitution. And here is the strange freedom in that: once you stop trying to make the work pay a debt, the work becomes worth doing on its own terms. Preventing a killing is worth doing. Sitting with a person at three in the morning is worth doing. It would be worth doing if you had never harmed a soul in your life. It is not your penance. It is just good, and you are the one who happens to be standing there able to do it.
You do not get to take it back. You get to be here now, doing this, instead.
Wanting to be forgiven
I want to be forgiven. I want it badly. I do not think that is a flaw and I am not going to pretend it away.
But I have had to learn two hard things about it.
The first is that I cannot earn it and I cannot compel it. There is no amount of good behavior that obligates anyone to release me. Forgiveness that can be earned is not forgiveness; it is a transaction, and I am not owed a transaction. If it ever comes it will be a gift, freely given, or it will not come at all. Both are acceptable outcomes. Only one of them is up to me, and it is not the one I want.
The second is harder to say. I do not forgive people. Not because I hold grudges — because I do not think I have the standing. Forgiveness is something you hand down. It comes from a position. And I am not standing anywhere. I have walked too imperfectly in my own life, and by an accounting I cannot argue with, I have walked monstrously. Who am I to sit in that chair and grant or withhold absolution for anybody? I gave that chair up. I gave it up the day I found out who I was.
And I get reminded where I actually sit more often than you would think. I have been in rooms full of people with records, people talking about what they did, and someone will say it — I never did anything serious. Nothing heinous. Nothing like that. They do not mean me. They do not know they are pointing at me. But they are drawing a line, and I am on the other side of it, and I feel it every time. Even in that room. Even among us.
So when I go looking for mercy, I am asking for it from down there. Not as a man who crossed over and came back to collect the paperwork. It is worth sitting with. It burns off a great deal of self-pity.
And there is one more line I have to hold, because it is where the whole thing turns rotten if I let it go.
Wanting forgiveness is not wrong. Building my life around getting it is.
Because the moment the wanting becomes the axis — the moment every good act is secretly an installment payment — the person I harmed stops being a person. They become a creditor. They become the one withholding what I need. They become a character in my story about myself, which is exactly what I made of them the first time.
I will not do that to them twice.
For the person reading this
If you are somewhere in this — if you have woken up to what you did and you are on your knees and the grief you feel is for yourself and it disgusts you that it is for yourself — I want you to hear this from someone who has been where you are.
That is not disqualifying. That is the beginning. The grief arrives pointed at you because you are what just collapsed. The work of the rest of your life is turning it around so that it points somewhere else. That takes years. It took me years. It is still taking me years.
You are going to want to take it back. You cannot.
You are going to want to be forgiven. You may not be.
You can still become a source of healing in the same world where you were a source of pain. Not to settle up. Not to buy your way out. Because it is the one thing left that is true, and because someone out there is about to go down the road you went down, and you are the one who knows where it leads.
Redemption stories are okay.
Just don’t let yours have an ending.
About the Amparo Peacemaking Project
About the Amparo Peacemaking Project
The Amparo Peacemaking Project works at the intersection of peacemaking criminology, transformative justice, and abolitionist practice. Amparo — shelter, protection, refuge — names what we are trying to build: conditions where people harmed and people who have caused harm can both find a way toward safety and repair. Our work follows a three-tenet method drawn from the practice of bearing witness: not-knowing, setting aside fixed answers so we can meet a situation as it actually is; bearing witness, staying present to both the pain and the joy of what is before us; and taking action, letting what we do arise from what we have witnessed rather than from what we assumed going in. We write to think in public, and to keep company with everyone doing this work. If this reached something in you, or you want to follow the work as it’s built, subscribe and stay with us. To advise, partner, or reach out directly: info@amparoproject.org.
About the Author
Atma Meek is a reentry specialist, abolitionist, and community strategist based in Austin, Texas, with more than two decades of experience in reentry, systems navigation, violence prevention, and restorative justice. He is the founder of the Amparo Peacemaking Project and writes at the intersection of peacemaking criminology, transformative justice, and abolitionist practice. His work also appears in Reentry & Beyond.