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You Can Be a Caring Person Despite Your Flaws
Being a Caregiver has taught me to be accepting of my imperfections.
I buy scratchcards, I drink whiskey and I smoke cigarettes, just a small selection of my many flaws. I'm far from perfect, but I'm also the Caregiver of my thirty-one-year-old sister who has a severe Learning Disability and Epilepsy. I think that I can be both of these things — flawed and caring — without them contradicting one another. Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn said it well enough:
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an un-uprooted small corner of evil”
I’m not saying that my efforts to be a Caregiver in spite of my proclivity towards cigarettes and gambling is comparable to a battle between good and evil, but rather that my heart is a grey area made up of a variety of instincts, some less admirable than others and that this is not something I should be ashamed of so much as it is a fact that I need to accept.
