It was a Sunday morning just after church ended, and The Husband was sticking around to fulfill his duties for the finance team (Harvard MBA = proficient offering counter). To maximize our time (ostensibly; to avoid awkward mingling in reality), I headed out to pick up our lunches–separate and plural. Though TH and I have many things in common, his passion for Taco Bell is not one of them. But it was my first stop, with my bagel sandwich to be picked up afterward at the self-proclaimed New York-style deli. FYI: if you aren’t run by an old Asian man and don’t contain miniature-sized, maximum-priced snack foods stacked alongside open-air fruit and vegetables in a questionably-odored hovel, you are not a New York-style deli. Just saying.

I pulled up to the drive-thru behind a car driven by a twenty-something girl whose boyfriend sat in the passenger seat. After she placed her order and I prepared to move up, she opened her door and placed a tall paper cup full of soda next to the curb. She then proceeded to drive forward and crush the cup as she headed toward her food and a trash can conveniently located mere feet away.

I felt my blood pressure spike as the rage boiled inside my veins. I imagined scenarios involving confrontations and apologies and her eventual arrest. LITTERING?! I thought in disbelief, feeling like I was stuck in an episode of Mad Men and looking around for drivers drinking scotch and smoking while pregnant. Who does that anymore? All of a sudden I was the world’s foremost environmentalist, all heated accusations and inconvenient truths. Then I saw her face in her side mirror: tired, hopeless, devoid of joy. And I was torn between identifying with a fellow human being, exchanging shoes and such…or engaging in my favorite pastime: judgment.

One of my favorite people recently accused me of being hard on myself in my writing, and after thinking that’s what she said, I thought about how it may come across to others, this introspective blog-posting whose grand finale is always hope but not before some confessions occur. The truth is that if I added up all the judgments I’ve made in my life, those against others would far outweigh what I’ve spent on myself. I’m a member of Facebook groups like “I judge you when you use poor grammar” and “I judge you when you take the elevator down one floor.” I use sarcasm as a weapon of condescension. I read too much Gawker, whose (talented) writers have elevated cynicism to an art form and dressed it up with the name snarkiness.

I think, therefore I judge.

And every time I do, I steal from the connectedness and joy that could be mine and replace it with poison.

Melodramatic? Maybe. But I know, deep down in that place where I rarely venture because only truth is spoken there, that I am a judging machine. I can’t remember the last time I had a completely peaceful car ride, one that didn’t include the urge to throw up a finger and form a concomitant summary of another person’s character based on his driving ability. I am a sucker for a book’s cover at the expense of the story inside. Negativity easily becomes the order of the day without the vigilance of gratitude stepping in.

Because in this world where each of us is placed into a category according to where we live, how old we are, what our political affiliation is–do we really need the additional reduction that criticism provides, the packaging of an entire life into a sound bite? A story into a bullet point?

And then there is the central irony to it all, the truth to which I am being made ever more aware as gratitude smooths my rough edges and opens my narrowed eyes: I am that person. I am the person who has littered, cut others off, acted like a dork, dressed like a slut, lived out of my insecurities and my worst self. Anything I judge others for, I’ve been guilty of. And for me, wherever judgment should have occurred is where I received grace instead. Such a precedent should shut my mouth and bend my knees forever.

I sat in our sunroom yesterday, nestled in a chair among the trees and filtering end-of-day light, and excitedly opened the fun read I’ve been working on for the past week to its last few pages. A few minutes later I sat stunned at an ending that defied comprehension, a resolution that made a mockery of the characters I had grown to know over four hundred pages. An entire story drained of meaning by the author’s refusal of continuity. And I realized that the story written for me, the narrative I live, is preceded and defined by love defying lesser claims. That when I set up camp in the field of judgment, I break continuity and move away from home. That because someone took my judgment, I can be free–from it, and of it.