This week, I watched a third grader in a small town open his very own brand-new dictionary and land on the word integrity. He read the definition aloud, then he looked up at the room and announced that he had integrity. Zero hesitation, no squint at the ceiling while he self-analyzed. He simply had that trait, settled and sure. 

I was standing at the front of his class with my fellow Rotary Club member, distributing those essential books to the children, and wondering… could I have been brave enough to say what he said? Do I have integrity?

That question followed me out of the school and into the rest of my week.

Then, yesterday, I went to Walmart.

I was walking through the store, half thinking about my to-do list and half thinking about dinner. When I looked up? – she was right there. A woman who was, for a stretch of my life, such a close friend of mine that I would’ve called her Sister. One of those… once in a lifetime kind of friends.

I watched her eyes go wide – which I didn’t even register at the time – and my entire nervous system went straight to OH HOLY HELL SHIT SHIT SHIT. Every cell within me jumped up at once and shouted we need to be anywhere else, right now, immediately, go!

So went I did. And briskly. I turned the corner with my tail tucked between my legs (metaphorically, though I’d believe you if you told me it was visible from space).

Now, I would love to tell you that I scurried away because it was the generous thing to do. That I spared her. That I made some graceful call not to unload my entire redemption arc on a woman who came in for groceries.

But… that would be a lie, and I have worked too damn hard on the honesty thing to start lying now.

I ran because I panicked. That is the whole noble and awful reason.

The worst part, though, is that she isn’t the only one. There’s an entire catalog of those lost friends, and they sure like to re-surface without warning. A name mentioned in passing. A car I recognize in the post office parking lot. Someone’s kid, suddenly five years older than the last time I saw them – which is especially cruel.

Here is what I did to earn that catalog: I was born broken, I did not want to admit how unwell I was, and I constantly drowned people in the fully unedited version of that. I was unreliable. I was pushy in a way I genuinely believed was enthusiasm. I needed more than any one person should ask for. Yet I asked anyway, over and over.

The thing I’ve finally stopped arguing with is that these people were not wrong to abandon me.

I used to get really mad about the ghosting part… about the way a friendship can end with no door slam at all, just an increasingly loud silence you keep shouting into. 

Now I can see what it probably looked like from where those friends were standing. Me, escalating. Other voices in their ears saying oh this is what everyone should know about Mariah. Their own exhaustion and sorrow. 

I guess that a person can only be somebody’s life raft for so long before they start to drown too, and nobody signs up for that. Not really.

So, no. I don’t hold it against those lost friends anymore. I mean, I mostly don’t. On a good day, I understand completely. On a bad day, I want to ask them where the hell they were when I was at my lowest. The fact that I know better now doesn’t stop me from wanting to ask.

Y’know, for most of my life, people have handed me chances that I did not deserve. Again and again, long past the point where it made any sense, people gave me grace I had no idea what to do with. I squandered every one of those chances, not out of malice, just out of being a woman on fire who kept reaching for flammable things.

Now I’m finally someone who could actually use a chance. And there aren’t any left.

That’s not self-pity, it’s just the truth. The people who knew me then have made their decisions, and they made them with good information. They can’t see past who I was because I was that person loudly, consistently, and for a loooooong time. I was a frequent flier to the grippy-sock doc, a one-woman demolition crew. Of course the record stands.

I’m not going to beg. I’ve done my begging. I spent a long time crying wolf, and I don’t get to be surprised that nobody comes running now that the wolf is real and I’ve finally learned to handle it myself.

So… I do the work instead. 

This is the part I haven’t admitted anywhere else, so bear with me while I say it badly. 

I have been keeping score.

Every meeting I chair. Every newsletter I write. Every volunteer opportunity I find. Some quiet accountant in the back of my head has been logging all of it, filing receipts, and keeping a running balance. I catch myself doing a good thing and feeling a small, hot flare of relief. If I’m honest about what the relief actually is, I think I’m telling myself hey maybe that one counted, maybe you’re a little further from Hell than you were this morning.

I’m not religious. I want to be clear about that, because this isn’t about doctrine or a building or anybody’s version of God. It’s older and dumber than that. It’s a conviction I’ve carried since I was born: that I came into this world already owing, that something about the way I am built is ruinous, and that eventually there will be a reckoning for it. Not just for what I’ve done. But for who I am.

You cannot volunteer your way out of that. Trust me, I have tried… I am still trying. I have an entire community section on my portfolio site that says, in essence, please please look at how hard I am trying.

Here’s the problem with keeping score, though. A ledger needs an accounting on the other side of it. An audit.

Everything I give goes out into the world and lands nowhere near the people it was meant for. The ex-friend I saw in Walmart? – she doesn’t get a deposit to her account when I chair a meeting. The friends I flaked on? – they don’t feel one bit better when I teach some kid to find a word alphabetically. I’ve been mailing restitutions to an address that doesn’t exist and then getting confused about why my balance never decreases.

So if the ledger can’t be balanced, and those friends aren’t coming back, and none of this will ever reach the accounts it was meant for... what the hell am I doing all this for?

I’ve got one answer… and, naturally, per the Moore way, it involves a story within a story.

Earlier today, I was driving. A thought wandered into my brain about whether people would have an easier time in life if I was no longer around to bother them. And this small voice, one I didn’t start to hear until the last two years, whispered to me: but your daughter needs you.

Because I can’t make it better for the people I already hurt. But I can make it better for my child. For who she gets to be, and what she grows up thinking is acceptable. She’ll never meet the version of me who burned those bridges. She only gets this one that I’m building now, and this one is going to be somebody she’s proud of.

So. Do I have integrity?

I still can’t say it the way that third-grader did. That kid looked up from his brand-new dictionary and claimed the word like it already belonged to him, and I stood there with my arms full of books and couldn’t manage it. Maybe that’s just the difference between eight-years-old and where I am now. Or maybe integrity isn’t a thing any of us really get to claim at all. Maybe it’s the name for what’s left over when you keep showing up for the work of making a difference.

I’ve spent a long time trying to sand myself down. Trying to round off the parts of me that stuck out awkwardly so that I’d fit one of the shapes this world already had lying around. It’s never worked. It just made me sharp in places that hurt people.

I guess that I’m a fuckin’ triangle in a world designed for circles and squares.

But I need to stop apologizing for my angles. I shouldn’t spend whatever blessed time I have left trying to pay off a karmic debt that I may have never earned. 

If there’s a reckoning coming for who I am, then it’s coming and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ll meet it when it gets here, triangle and all.