Jo Club, 4/n, “Write about betrayal.”

I’ve been thinking a lot over the past year about how unsupportive I’ve been to the people around me.

Recently, I realized that a lot of those experiences were tied to my previous jobs, like my college work-study job and my part-time jobs after that. I brushed off many coworkers who were openly dealing with traumatic experiences, or introduced uncomfortable topics of conversation without realizing that they could be triggering. I can’t stop thinking about how sad I must have made those around me feel, or even how they must have, understandably, distanced themselves from me after I proved to be an unreliable person.

At the time, I worried a lot about saying the wrong thing. Now I realize that saying nothing is its own way of “saying the wrong thing,” and my silence affects people in its own way.