Responsibility. For a long time, that was a dirty word to me. It sounded like obligation, duty, bondage. Heavy. To be avoided.
Maybe I overstate my case. For certainly, if I avoided all responsibility, I couldn’t have built the things I did, including a lab at a University and then a business that has survived somehow for 16 years.
Yet, when I consider that word, there has always been a part of me that said “No thanks, that’s not me.” Or maybe it was just a part of me that internalized the voices of various adults in my life, who said: “be more responsible! Clean up your room! Do your homework! Stop taking apart radios and playing with your animals”. (true fact: for most of my life up until high school, I always had some kind of reptile or fish in an aquarium. Turtles were my favorites.)
That internalized voice made our responsibility to be something that was averse to what I actually wanted. I’ve figured out since then that I love learning, only I never loved the type of learning that came with words like “homework” – especially when it was someone else telling me to do those things.
Because I wasn’t particularly good at listening, always having a bit of a stubborn streak, I got the label of “irresponsible.”
The outside label became an inside label. Given that label, it was hard to feel any kinship to the word “responsibility.”
Yet the weird thing is, as I approach six decades of life, the word is becoming important to me. It turns out I had some of it all along. But it was a different thing than I learned from adults.
The “responsibility” I learned growing up was basically the idea of satisfying other people’s desires, fears, and expectations.
For example, let’s take cleaning up my room. Now, since it was my room, all the way at the end of the house, and nobody came in there except to figure out if it was messy and tell me to clean it up, it seems a bit ridiculous to think that if the mess wasn’t bothering me, why did I need to be “responsible” to clean it up? Why was it “irresponsible” to not clean it up?
Some adults clearly thought they were “teaching me something.” Yet what they did is messed with my head, like one big psy-op. Because they produced exactly the opposite effect of the one they intended.
Years of self-observation have led me to notice that I like it better when my environment isn’t too messy. Yet I wasn’t allowed to discover that for myself early on, because I was too beholden to the “adults in the room” and what they thought was right, true, and important for me.
This form of responsibility is one that is imposed. So the question I’ve considered is this: is imposed responsibility really responsibility? Or is it something else, a sort of echo of responsibility, like a diminutive form with less power and more heaviness?
If there is this “diminutive form of responsibility”, like the minor chord to a major, then what is the true form of responsibility all about?
The animals I mentioned earlier may have a role in clarifying this.
I was only a so-so caretaker of the turtles, the lizards, and the fish. I loved watching them, I was intrigued by them, and I truly felt care for them. And yet, school, friends, and other demands had me scattered. Sometimes, the poor animals would be neglected, and didn’t survive very long. So off I went to get another one.
I have had literal nightmares in my adult years of finding dead animals, and realizing the horror of my neglect. Obviously this thing that I could so easily overlook when I was young had an effect on me – a very long lasting effect. It amplified the sense I had taken on, from those adults, that I was irresponsible.
Perhaps this points at the difference: I have never had a bad dream about an unkempt room. Never one regret. When it got too messy, I’d clean it up and feel better—no adult prodding needed. But my absence of care for those animals—ones I’d taken from the wild, caged, then neglected—that is haunting.
It kind of amazes me that the adults in my life let me do that. Despite that they wanted me to “be more responsible” – on this thing that actually mattered, they didn’t do much to help me actually be more responsible (by saying a thing like: no, you can’t get another turtle if you don’t truly take care of this one, aka a turtle moratorium).
Why does my neglect – my irresponsibility – towards the animals seem so different than my so called irresponsibility towards keeping my room clean?
One has love and care for another being involved. The other does not.
The animals illustrate this important nuance far better than a human could. The animals I neglected weren’t able to talk back. They couldn’t argue. They couldn’t divorce me, berate me, or blame me. They would never tell me “you’re being irresponsible.”
They just were. I either cared for them, or didn’t. And the results of that choice carried on with me for years.
It points to a nuance that is very difficult to get as a 3D human, yet it affects us at so many levels. It is that loving responsibility towards others is loving responsibility to the self, along with its inverse: loving responsibility towards self expresses as loving responsibility towards others.
This is a weird nuance in our otherwise polarized world. We’re used to thinking of “us versus them” or “this versus that.” Most things in our world operate that way.
But love, as the ultimate energy of creation, does not behave by the same rules. It does not separate subject from object. Its only polarity is that it’s either present or it’s not as present. (Is it ever truly absent? That’s worth another contemplation)
So, in my lack of responsibility and love for the animals I held, there was also a lack of responsibility and love for myself. I was experiencing less flow of love because I wasn’t doing it for the animals, and I wasn’t doing it for myself, which meant I couldn’t do it for the animals. If that sounds circular, it is. Love for self is love for others. Love for others is love for self. They aren’t separate streams. They’re the same whole.
Now I feel like I just opened a honey jar next to an ant nest. So let’s focus it back into the subject at hand: responsibility. It would seem that maybe responsibility and love are connected.
More specifically, it appears that the fullest form of responsibility is an expression of love, for both self and others. It is a responsibility to see “I” and “them” in the highest regard, in the purest light, and to act upon that as needed physically.
This has startling implications. For it says that if what we’re doing is not from self-love, it isn’t really other-love, either.
Can that be true? Or have I just painted myself into a corner of words?
One thing I have clearly observed: if someone doesn’t have much self-love, they are far more likely to neglect those they might care for. I.e. the absent parent, or alcoholic parent/workaholic parent: those patterns of behavior, at the deepest level, stem from a lack of deeper self-love, expressed as the lack of self-care. That lack of self-care, which is a core responsibility of any human on the planet, then overflows into the lack of other care.
Maybe we are onto something then, and perhaps that something can illuminate this issue of responsibility, in its more diminutive form versus its fuller form.
It seems that we can divide those forms along the lay lines of love.
Diminutive responsibility is a thing we feel we must do for others—to avoid their disappointment, or to generate approval, to be seen as responsible, to be liked. In other words, this form of responsibility is performative. It’s a transaction. We perform the behavior to manage someone else’s emotional response, not because it flows from self-love.
It is putting on a show so we don’t get punished (the stick) and/or we get a reward (the carrot), but not inherently as an expression of self love (which is also other-love).
Then the fuller, richer form of responsibility is that which is done not performatively, but starts with care and love for the self, expressed as responsibility to the self: to take care of our needs for rest, for time, for space, taking care of our bodies, our focus, our centeredness. When we do these kinds of responsibilities, the love in that, because it’s not performatively, flows over to others we care about. We become a positive force because we are embodying love, starting with ourselves.
(Author’s note: Some people hear “self-love” and think narcissism. That’s an inversion. A narcissist lacks self-love, so they perform to extract validation from others—a desperate attempt to fill the void. True self-love doesn’t demand external approval. It flows. A truly self-loving person cannot be a narcissist. Love transcends ego.)
So this kind of responsibility is the much more difficult one to embody in today’s world. I’ve asked myself many times why this is so difficult.
The short answer: this true and full responsibility—the embodiment of self-love flowing into other-love—is what our whole system of operation is designed to separate us from.
We are trained to perform for others, not self love.
We are taught to outsource our self care, to the “professionals” who know what’s best
We think of responsibility in terms like I did when I was younger, that being “irresponsible” is letting down someone else who doesn’t like what we’re doing, rather than being responsible to our own selves and our inner well-being first and foremost.
Most of all, most of us are trained with a deep sense of guilt and even shame if we stray from the path of being performatively responsible.
Those guilts and shames stick in our system, controlling many of us from birth to death, programming us to do the things that others want us to do in the name of so-called “responsibility.”
If my parents had taught me to tune into my own feelings about those poor caged animals I collected, to understand what this was doing to my sense of self love and self worth in neglecting them, I would have advanced much more quickly in my true responsibility than I did with being berated about a messy room.
But, after almost six decades of life, I’m finally getting it. By sharing this with you, I hope it will help you on a journey to getting it much sooner than I did.
What’s your experience of responsibility toward yourself—those expressions of self-love? Can you take a vacation just because you need it, without guilt or shame, even if others might judge you? Or do you feel that familiar pang—the one that says you’re being selfish, irresponsible, letting someone down?
If you feel it, you’re not alone. And you’re not broken. You’re just operating inside an architecture that conditioned you to perform responsibility instead of embody it.