Sometimes it’s just not your fault.

My parents brought me up to take responsibility for my actions. It was so straightforward: If I maintained an “A” average, I could continue to take piano lessons. If I dropped to a “B”, I had to bring up my grades before I was allowed extracurricular activities. This has the unfortunate effect of getting me to believe that the world was a fair place, and that hard work was rewarded.

But somewhere during the course of living, things seemed to happen beyond reason even when I was at my best. Things that I couldn’t control. Crazy things. Why did the office bully choose me? Why was my car/home broken into? How could I possibly know that he was in love with someone else? Why was I tricked, deceived, or otherwise treated badly?

I ultimately came to the conclusion that many things that had happened to me—the bad things—were simply beyond my control. I had no hand in creating them. I could not control the outcome. Because there are some truly shitty people in this world.

But before that, I lived with some sort of nebulous, pervasive shame; I picked apart situations, asking myself, “Did I do something here? Maybe it was this, or that, or whatnot.” I felt the need to take responsibility for actions and events that I could not have ever controlled. I felt as though I should apologize and take responsibility for … what, exactly? Taking the wrong job? Dating the wrong person? When none of these things were evident to me when I initially made those choices—?

“Forgive yourself.” But … why? There was nothing to forgive.

Sometimes it’s not your fault, and sometimes it is. Wisdom is borne out of discerning the difference. And once you learn when something is not your fault—when you did the best you could do—you begin to live without shame, guilt and self-recrimination. Life gets much better, really quickly.