Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [123]
For Penny, then, denial was never an option. Or at least, that is how she tells it. And yet, as we have seen, denial is always an option, and an attractive one. It serves to shield us from pain, humiliation, guilt, and change—such a basic and forceful imperative that, even at its most egregious, denial is relatively easy to understand. In fact, it is acceptance that is often the greater mystery. If we shake our heads at people like Attorney General Michael McGrath and call him crazy, we shake our heads at people like Penny Beerntsen with something like awe. True, admiring other people’s ability to face their mistakes isn’t the same as facing our own. But it is a start. It reminds us that, as seen from the outside, denying error looks irrational, irresponsible, and ugly, while admitting it looks like courage, and like honor, and like grace.
And sometimes, too, it looks extremely hard. For Penny, refusing to resort to denial means living with immensely complicated and contradictory realities: with her suffering but also her error; with Avery’s suffering but also his atrocity. She had felt warmly toward him, moved by his ordeal and blessed by his compassion toward her in the face of it. When he was accused of Halbach’s murder, she was, she said, “flabbergasted.” She wondered how she could have been so wrong yet again, this time about Avery as a person. And she thought, too, about her own uncontrollable anger after the rape, and tried to fathom the kind of rage that might accumulate during almost two decades of wrongful imprisonment. To her already doubled sense of responsibility—for Avery’s lost years, for the other women who had suffered at the hands of Gregory Allen—she now had to add a third, of almost inconceivable gravity: “If I had identified the correct person, would Teresa Halbach be alive today?”
As Penny knows, that question is unanswerable. Nobody can say what the course of history would have been if her life and Avery’s had never intersected. And she knows, too, that she will have to find a way to live without that answer, and without the answer to many other questions about why the prosecution of her assault went so terribly awry.
This is what makes Penny’s story so remarkable: she is able to live both with and without the truth. That is exactly what overcoming denial calls on us to do. Sometimes in life we won’t know the answers, and sometimes we will know them but not like them. Our minds, no matter how miraculous, are still limited. Our hearts, no matter how generous, can’t always keep us from hurting other people. In other words, denial isn’t just about refusing to accept the difficult, complicated, messy external world. Nor is acceptance just about accepting the facts. It is also, and most importantly, about accepting ourselves.
12.
Heartbreak
You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be…and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them: you get them wrong while you’re with them and then you get home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on a significance that is ludicrous, so ill equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims?…The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that