PS C:\> tar -xf Nice_Try_Andy_v1.zip
Application_Install.exe
Someone called me a creep in public last weekend. He did it loudly. He did it in front of other people. He looked at a stranger quietly spreading anonymous kindness and reached for the most dehumanizing word he could find. He didn’t ask what I was doing. He didn’t give me the benefit of the doubt. He just aimed it at me and pulled the trigger.
I wrote him a letter. Not to start a fight. Not to make him feel bad. I wrote it because he tried to silence me with shame, and I do not let anyone silence me with shame anymore. I wrote it because he deserved to know who he said that to, what I have survived, and what I was actually doing when he decided to call it creepy. I wrote it because accountability is one of my core values, and that means I hold other people to it too, not just myself. And I wrote it because there is a broader truth underneath this whole thing that I think matters: you do not know what another person is carrying. You do not know what they have survived. You do not know how fragile and hard-won their sense of worth might be. Snap judgments can land like weapons on people who are already bleeding. Trauma is what drives people to hurt each other. And kindness, real kindness, is one of the few things that actually interrupts that cycle.
That is the application. The rest is the source code.
Source_Code.txt
The open-source code below is free, for you to analyze, modify, and build your own application with.
> why I wrote this instead of staying quiet: shame_will_not_silence_me.txt
I want to be clear about why this letter exists.
I did not write it to embarrass Andy. I handed it to him quietly and I am not mentioning his full name here. I did not write it to get sympathy. I did not write it to perform my pain for an audience or to make myself look righteous. I wrote it because something happened that caused real harm, and I am no longer the kind of person who absorbs harm in silence and calls it grace.
For most of my life, I stayed quiet when people hurt me. I swallowed it. I managed it alone. I told myself it wasn’t a big deal, or that saying something would make things worse, or that the other person didn’t mean it. I learned that lesson early, painfully, and repeatedly. Speaking my truth was dangerous. So I didn’t. And the silence built up into resentment, and the resentment became a slow toxin, and the toxin destroyed things I loved.
I don’t do that anymore.
When someone harms me, I name it. Directly. Clearly. Without cruelty, but without apology. That is not aggression. That is accountability moving in both directions. I hold myself to it and I extend it outward. Andy chose to shame a stranger doing something good, in public, in front of other people. He deserves to know that. He deserves to sit with it. And I deserve to say so.
Shame is a silencing tool. It always has been. When someone calls you something dehumanizing in front of others, the intended effect is collapse. Shrink. Disappear. Stop doing the thing. Stop being the thing. Feel small enough to go away.
It did not work.
It never works on me anymore.
> the letter I sent him: open_letter_to_andy.txt
Andy,
You called me a creep last weekend.
Not quietly. Not privately. You called me over in a public setting and you berated me. You looked at a stranger spreading anonymous kindness and you chose shame as your response. You didn’t ask what I was doing. You didn’t give me the benefit of the doubt. You saw something you didn’t understand and you weaponized the most dehumanizing word you could find and aimed it at me in front of other people.
I want you to know who you said that to.
I am a disabled veteran. I have carried trauma in my body and mind that most people will never come close to understanding. What I have been through nearly killed me. Not once. Multiple times. I have stood at edges that I am not going to describe to you and somehow found a reason to step back. I fought my way through addiction. I rebuilt myself from nothing, slowly, painfully, and with a lot of help from people who believed in me when I couldn’t believe in myself. I am still rebuilding. Every single day.
And this is what I do with that second chance. I spread quiet, anonymous kindness to strangers who will never know where it came from. No recognition. No reward. Just the belief that a small unexpected moment of warmth can change the trajectory of someone’s day, and maybe more than that.
I am not alone in this. There are well over 20 people that I know of doing exactly what you witnessed me doing. Every single one of them has a story that would stop you cold. Every single one of them has been through something that nearly destroyed them. Every single one of them looked at their pain and made the same choice. To turn it into something that helps people. When you called me a creep, you didn’t just insult me. You insulted every one of them. You insulted every person who has ever clawed their way back from the edge and decided to spend their second chance on kindness instead of bitterness. You insulted the very act of choosing love when life has given you every reason not to.
The word creep doesn’t leave a person easily, Andy. It lands differently when you are already carrying weight. You don’t know who you are talking to when you say something like that. You don’t know what that person has survived. You don’t know how many mornings they had to fight just to get out of bed and try again. You don’t know how fragile and hard won their sense of worth might be. That word, thrown casually at someone doing something good, is the kind of thing that embeds itself. I will remember you for it. Not with hatred. But I will remember.
The project you tried to shame has now reached a known 2,350 individual acts of kindness across Bellingham and the greater Puget Sound area. Those 2,350 moments rippled outward into thousands more. People went home changed. They were kinder to their kids that night. They helped a stranger they might have otherwise walked past. They shared what happened publicly, where thousands of people saw that kindness still exists in this world and felt something shift in them.
You witnessed one small moment of that and called it creepy.
I want you to sit with that, Andy. Really sit with it. While you were standing there deciding to shame a stranger, something was quietly spreading through this community that has touched more lives than either of us can count. And you tried to stop it with a single word.
You didn’t.
I don’t know what you carry, Andy. I don’t know what has happened to you or what makes a person respond to kindness with hostility. But I know that people who shame strangers for doing good are usually hurting in ways they haven’t found words for yet. I genuinely hope you find relief from whatever that is. I hope someone shows you unexpected kindness when you least expect it and need it most.
I hope you find love, happiness, peace, harmony, and less suffering in all aspects of your life. Truly.
With love, and sincerely yours,
The “creep”
> what he didn't know he was looking at: survivor_context.log
Here is the thing about snap judgments. They skip the whole person.
Andy saw a stranger doing something in public he didn’t recognize. His brain ran its pattern recognition software, found no match, and generated an output. That output was the worst word he could reach for. He did not pause. He did not ask. He did not extend the basic human courtesy of assuming good intent in an ambiguous situation. He just fired.
We all do this. Every single one of us.
We see something unfamiliar and our nervous system decides what it is before our rational mind has a chance to weigh in. That is not a character flaw. That is a survival mechanism. The problem is when we let the threat response run the whole show, including the part where we open our mouths and aim it at another human being.
You do not know what the stranger in front of you has survived. You do not know how many times they came close to not being here. You do not know whether the thing they are doing that looks strange to you is the thing that is keeping them alive, or the thing they built from the wreckage of the version of themselves that almost didn’t make it. You do not know any of that. And most of the time, you don’t ask.
I am a disabled veteran. I have survived more hospitalizations than I care to count. I have been through addiction and come out the other side. I have clawed my way back from edges I will not describe in detail here. I am still rebuilding. Every. Single. Day. And what I do with this second chance, the one I almost did not get, is spread anonymous kindness to strangers who will never know my name.
That is what Andy called creepy.
That is the gap between what a snap judgment sees and what is actually there.
> trauma is the root of almost every wound we give each other: root_cause_analysis.err
I said it in the letter and I mean it completely: people who shame strangers for doing good are usually hurting in ways they haven’t found words for yet.
That is not me letting Andy off the hook. He is responsible for his behavior. Full stop. But it is me refusing to see him as simply a bad person, because I do not believe in simply bad people. I believe in people who are in pain, people who have not yet found a way to process that pain, and people whose unprocessed pain leaks outward and lands on everyone around them.
I used to be one of those people.
For a long time I was someone whose internal suffering expressed itself in ways that hurt others. Not because I was evil. Because I was damaged and I did not have the tools or the support or the awareness to do anything differently. My patterns were running the show. My addiction was running the show. My unprocessed grief was running the show. And the people closest to me paid the price for all of it.
I know what it looks like from the inside of that. And I know what it looks like from the outside too. Trauma does not stay contained to the person who experienced it. It radiates. It shapes how people see the world, how safe they feel in it, how quickly they shift into threat response, how hard it is to extend trust or grace or basic human curiosity to a stranger doing something unfamiliar.
I do not know what Andy carries. I genuinely do not. But I know that his response to witnessing kindness was hostility, and that tells me something. Not about his character. About his pain.
I hope he finds his way to something that helps. I mean that with my whole chest. Not as a performance of magnanimity. Because I know what it is like to be someone whose pain makes them lash out, and I know what the road out of that looks like, and it is long and it is hard and nobody should have to walk it alone.
> 2350 moments and counting: ripple_effect.out
I am part of something I am not going to name or fully describe here, because it is not mine alone to name. It is a decentralized, open, uncontrolled movement of people spreading anonymous acts of kindness throughout the Puget Sound region and possibly well beyond. Nobody is in charge of it. Nobody owns it. It cannot be stopped or contained because there is no center to shut down. It just keeps moving, person to person, stranger to stranger, quietly and without fanfare.
There are over 20 people actively doing this that I personally know of. The number is much higher based on the decentralized and uncontrolled nature of this project. Every single one of them has a story. Every single one of them has been through something. Every single one of them looked at their pain and made a specific choice: to turn it into something that helps people instead of something that hurts them.
A known 2,350 individual acts of kindness. That is the number as of when I wrote Andy’s letter. And that number is already wrong, because it keeps growing. And every single one of those 2,350 moments rippled outward. The person who received it went home different. They were a little warmer to the people in their life. They helped someone they might have walked past. Some of them shared what happened, and thousands of people saw that kindness still exists and felt something shift in them. And some of those thousands paid it forward to someone else. And so on.
One act of kindness can easily result in hundreds more.
That is the nature of this thing. It is not controlled. It is not tracked. It cannot be fully measured. It just spreads, the way kindness has always spread, the way warmth moves through a room, one person at a time, without needing permission or an audience or a name attached to it.
Andy tried to stop one moment of it with a single word.
He didn’t.
> the case for loving people you don't know yet: universal_love.cfg
I love everyone. I know that sounds like a bumper sticker. It is not.
It is something I have arrived at slowly, painfully, through years of doing the hardest internal work of my life. Through getting sober. Through IFS work and sitting with the parts of myself I had been hiding for decades. Through learning to extend to myself the same compassion I had always tried to extend to others. And through discovering, on the other side of all of that, that the wall between me and other people had mostly been built out of my own unprocessed fear.
When I look at a stranger now, I do not see a threat or a category or a type. I see a person who is carrying something. I do not know what it is. But I know it is there. Everyone is carrying something. The weight varies. The shape of it varies. But nobody walks through this life without accumulating damage, and almost all of the damage humans do to each other is downstream of pain they have not yet found a way to metabolize.
That is not an excuse for harm. It is an explanation of its origin.
Understanding why someone is the way they are does not mean you have to accept being their target. I held Andy accountable. I named what he did. I told him directly that it was wrong and that it caused harm. And I also told him I hope for him to find love, happiness, peace, harmony, and less suffering in all aspects of his life. Both of those things are true at the same time. I am love. That does not mean I am a doormat. It means I can see the human inside the behavior, even when the behavior is aimed at me.
I want everyone to be able to do this. Not because it is easy. It is not. It is one of the hardest things I have ever learned. But because the alternative is a world where we keep firing at each other across the gap of our assumptions, where we keep mistaking unfamiliar for dangerous, where we keep letting our unprocessed pain become someone else’s wound.
Kindness interrupts that cycle. Every single time. It doesn’t fix everything. It doesn’t heal every wound. But it creates a moment where the cycle pauses. Where something different is possible. Where a person who was bracing for threat receives warmth instead and their nervous system has to recalibrate.
That is worth doing. That is worth protecting. That is worth writing a letter about.
That is worth being called a creep for, if that is what it costs.
But I’m a creep
I’m a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?