Here Comes the Judge

On the futility of honking your horn.

I recently got really mad at the sun. Stay with me. For those of you who don’t live in Southern California, we’ve just exited a gnarly heat wave, with temperatures in my neighborhood getting up to 107, as part of what scientists or at least the people who refer to scientists on TV refer to as a “heat dome.” I realize climate change poses an existential threat, but these terms to describe weather events are getting out of hand: heat dome, atmospheric river, bomb cyclone, frost dungeon, polar vortex…only one of those is made up, but can you tell which one?

I hate to complain because I know some people and places have it even worse. But it still sucked. It was too hot to exercise outside—no decompressing runs, no head-clearing walks. The whole thing felt like a punishment, as if we were on house arrest.

On the second day of this, I was walking the dogs a measly block so they could poop. The heat was so bad it felt like pushing through hot cotton. We’d been outside maybe seven minutes, stepped from shadow into sun, and that’s when I felt the anger swell, this acute, vibrating frustration, cortisol burbling as if someone had stolen something from me: Fuck you, sun. How dare you, sun. Eat a dick, sun.

What!?

How ridiculous is this? How pointless is it to be mad at a celestial body, at the weather? To feel aggrieved, to feel slighted? To take it personally? Which I did!

It’s pointless, is the answer. And yet I do it all the time. I’m a judgment monster and I have been since my earliest days. We all are. I see it every day. I know because when I do see it, I judge it.

Maybe I have it worse than you; it’s hard to say. I have a reputation amongst my friends for being the judgy one, the person who’s never quite satisfied. Sure the movie was good, but… Yeah, the food was interesting, but… I dunno where it comes from. Perhaps it was a reaction to the toxic positivity that suffused the musical theater and bible study communities I was a part of during adolescence. Perhaps it’s a consequence of listening to too much Pavement and the Smiths growing up: I was looking for a job and then I found a job/ And heaven knows I’m miserable now.

Wherever it came from, I basically made a career out of it, translating my judgmental tendencies into cold hard cash by way of professional music criticism. As Heath Ledger’s Joker once said: If you’re good at something, never do it for free. But I haven’t made a living as a music critic in over a decade. I moved on, but the judgment stuck around, found new things to fix its gaze on. This morning, as I was meditating, I actually got mad at the meditation teacher’s recorded instructions. They were too…something. 

An easy explanation for where this outlook came from is that I’m an alcoholic. Now, we can debate where that came from—genes, upbringing, bad luck—but there’s consensus that being a drunk goes hand-in-hand with a tendency to judge. In fact, someone suggested judgment as a topic in a recent meeting. Sometimes people struggle with what to say on certain topics, but this wasn’t one of those nights. You could tell people had strong opinions. I know because I judged them.

And just to say: The person I judge the harshest is…me. There’s that cliché about whenever you point a finger at someone there are three fingers pointing back at yourself, and yeah, that scans: It feels like I dole out three-times the judgment on myself compared to what I reserve for everything and everybody else, and considering how much that is, well…

And so what to do? First, a digression: I’m a type 1 diabetic, which is a chronic disease, so there’s no cure, only the hope of good management. In my case, this means wearing two medical devices—one to measure my glucose, and another to administer insulin—all day, every day, for the rest of my life. This can be a hassle, especially when it comes to dealing with insurance companies and pharmacies, but for the most part I don’t think about it. When I do start to feel frustrated, I try to be grateful for how much things have advanced. When I was diagnosed in 2009, insulin pumps were the size of cell phones. Less than a century ago, type 1 diabetes was basically a death sentence. 

Being judgmental is like a chronic disease. After 46 years on this planet, I’ve given up hope that I will cure it—my only hope is to manage it, and thankfully there are ways to do this. In AA you hear about “The Pause”: “As we go through the day we pause, when agitated or doubtful, and ask for the right thought or action.”  

In Buddhism, judgment and associated feelings—agitation, reactivity, aversion—are grouped as “ill will.” Ill will is one of the “Five Hindrances,” a set of mental states that, as the name suggests, hinder our progress and increase suffering. A big reason I’m drawn to mindfulness meditation is it helps me to recognize when I’m in one of these states as it’s happening. As A.J. Daulerio put it in a recent Healings FAQ: “The more I meditate, the less I honk my horn.” Perfect. 

I dunno about you, but to me the world often feels purpose-built to indulge our reactivity. That car horn’s right there in the middle of the wheel. That “Like” button’s right there next to every post, and so is a blank space for you to clown or threaten the post’s author, if that’s your thing. Everyone in your feed is carping and yelling, and often being rewarded for it. It can feel so satisfying to carp back, to lay into your own horn over and over and over. But it’s about as useless as hurling insults at the sun. 

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Healings is written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Ayana H. Muwwakkil provides art direction.

Healings is about illness, recovery, spirituality, and related topics, and began in the summer of 2023 as a chronicle of Garrett’s battle with cancer. We make no guarantees that it will hold together, thematically speaking, now or ever.