I’ve been thinking a lot about what this means.

It’s one of those sentiments that follows you when growing up. Be kind to your sister.  Play nice at school today. Be good for your nanny this weekend. Because when you’re young, being kind and good is the best thing you can be. You can be clever – but that doesn’t really matter yet. You can be pretty – but who knows what puberty will do to you. You can be funny – but not in the way that grown-ups are. But kind, or good, is accessible and achievable and commendable and something that we all usually wanted to be at one point or another. Until we don’t anymore. 

Because being kind is only fun for a little while. Because when it stops being something you’re actively praised for, it’s boring. Because soon enough you can be clever or pretty or funny or artistic or whatever else. Because they probably won’t hear about what you’re saying anyway, so it’s harmless. It’s banter. Stop being so dramatic. I can have my own opinions. It was just a joke. God, you’re boring sometimes. I can’t say anything anymore.

And then it matters. A headline emerges that makes all of our not-being-kind behaviours matter. 

And so we’re back in this strange little place where for a few days, if that, we care. We text our friends and family and check on them. We talk about how awful it must have been to feel so low, so desperate. We discuss how if she could have just made it through those ten minutes or that hour or that day things would be different. 

And in these periods I’d really like to believe that maybe things will change. That people will take responsibility for their own actions and be better. That press will stop harassing women over their love lives, their bodies, their sexuality. That being kind will exceed the shelf life of a hashtag. But more often than not, I’m disappointed. 

We slowly slip into what has become the norm. Until the next person takes their own life. Or the person after that. Or the one after that.

Be kind until it’s inconvenient for you.

Be kind unless it will get a laugh. 

Be kind but learn to take a joke.

Now, something that I’m often told is that I am too passionate about social issues. I take things to heart too easily and make it difficult for people to comfortably talk around me. I police conversations. But I won’t apologise for that.

I won’t apologise because we’ve made something that should be so simple, stupidly complex. It shouldn’t be this hard to act in an acceptable way to the people around us. It shouldn’t be hard to choose not to say something cruel. It should not be the norm to bend the rules when it best benefits us. 

I’m not implying that I don’t slip up, but I will say that I am trying to correct myself when I do.