"As she listened she was captivated" (S74)

As she listened she was captivated. The man on the video was speaking as if he had authority. She didn’t like his tone. He made statements about moral questions that he seemed to think were more black and white than she thought, and he spoke as if what seemed to be his own opinion was objective truth.

The video was about mercy and love. In the video the man explained that if someone is in error or doing something wrong, then it is an act of kindness to hold them to account and challenge their behaviour. He said that it was in fact a moral imperative, especially in cases where one individual has authority over another for that person to challenge vices in the other. To fail to do so, or to let what he described as errors(such as identifying by pronouns different from the ones used from birth) go unchecked, was in actuality to lie, and to be unmerciful.

As first Jesse was angry. She felt he wasn’t being compassionate. Why did he think he could tell her what to do? Wasn’t it judgemental?

She didn’t stop the video though. She wanted to know what he would say next.

She felt like there might be a truth to what he said, and far from feeling that she’d learned something positive, she felt a rising sense of dread.

She wondered why she felt so emotionally effected by what he said, it wasn’t that any particular time that she had failed to do as he said came to her mind, an uncomfortable feeling of unease and dread.

It wasn’t unusual she thought, for a religious video to suggest behaving better, but she still felt shocked. It was as by his insistence that everyone should be on a journey of self improvement, he was undermining the journey of self acceptance that she’d been trying to achieve.

Each time she’d looked in the mirror and told herself that she was perfect, and that she should never change; he was destroying all that by telling her that she wasn’t perfect and that she needed to change.

Why does he that that’s good news? She wondered.