Sometimes I jaywalk

2026-09-27.

When I need to cross the street and the nearest crosswalk is annoyingly far away, I break the rules and jaywalk.

I have never felt bad about this, but here’s the thing: I friggin’ loved rules. I loved the certainty they provided. I liked how I didn’t have to think, I could just follow the rules. I liked knowing that I did something right because I followed the rules. I liked reflecting on how much thought had gone into creating the rules and how little effort it took to just follow them. I’ve never been drunk; I’ve never tried other drugs; I’ve never stolen anything aside from two Hot Wheels cars as a 7-year-old; I’ve never been charged with any sort of crime.

But this whole time, I’ve jaywalked on a regular basis. I’ve looked around, determined it was safe, and decided to save myself some time. I’ve been doing this crazy thing called “using good judgement.” I thought about the rule, decided to break it, and moved on with my life.

I’ve started doing that more. It’s very freeing.

I’m going to talk about my history of being sexually assaulted now.

In short, there have been 3-4 problem women in my life. I tried to resist them all. But I was torn: the rules say I should like women, and as a teenager, I should certainly like sex! If I resisted, I became someone who didn’t like sex, and someone who doesn’t like sex isn’t much of a person at all. I learned this when I started identifying as asexual, and was quickly bullied out of it by basically everyone I knew. “So your parts don’t work?” asked an adult. An adult! “At least you weren’t gang raped,” said another. Hard to argue with that. “What does that even mean?” Listen, I wish I knew; I was just as confused as they were. Weren’t these encounters supposed to be good?

That was the rule: teenage boys like sex. And that’s what I was getting! And I didn’t like it one bit. I was breaking the rules, and I was not happy with myself.

I’m now much happier to break the rules and err in favor of good judgement.

I grew up quite happy to live in a post-Civil Rights world. “Those racist rules were bad,” I always thought, “I’m glad we got rid of all the bad rules.” I am here today to inform you that there are still bad rules. I won’t give examples, I don’t have enough terabytes for that, but suffice to say that as long as humans are writing the rules, a significant portion of them will be straight-up bad.

Fortunately, I was Catholic. God made those rules. And God is perfect! So let’s check the Catholic rules real quick…

Hm. I don’t like this one. It feels unnecessary and intrusive and based on one short line in the Old Testament that comes one chapter before that book also mentions not mixing fabrics and that whole “mixing fabrics” thing was fulfilled in Christ so we don’t have to worry about it anymore, right? Right?

OK, what about this one. People say the Catholic Church is homophobic but I’ve always pointed to this rule to say they’re just kinda sexophobic, if anything. Technically, fornication-ophobic and birth-control-ophobic but those don’t roll off the tongue. But like, why is this rule here? Anybody? I read a book about it and I still don’t understand. I Googled it a lot and found surprisingly little explanation, like, anywhere. You’d think this rule would be explained more. Oh, 98% of Catholics don’t follow it? Hm.

But these are God’s rules. And God is perfect! But these rules… they don’t seem perfect to me. And I don’t just say this as someone trying to have fun in my new relationship. I say this as someone who has been looking at these rules since I was a young teenager. Since my first girlfriend, at age 14, told me genitalia don’t determine gender (that confused me). Since I wanted to know all the rules so I could follow them, and this was one of the earliest ones mentioned by everyone I asked. Right after being nice and not murdering and going to church. It took much longer for anyone to explain consent to me.

I really, really tried to follow the rules at work. Start in the early morning, end in the evening, make sure you get about 40 hours done each week. Log all your sick days, and don’t go beyond your 10-days-a-year limit.

Then I got pericarditis. And a concussion. And bronchitis. I used all my sick days by mid-April. I started disability in May, after using some gray-market sick days. I came back in June and tried my darndest. I did well. Then my boss left, I started fearing death, I watched someone enter a coma, and I got stressed to the dickens about the physical aspect of this wonderful new romantic relationship I had started. I was honest with my team: “I’m not feeling well today, will be working sporadically.” I said that a lot and eventually added, honestly, “I have a doctor appointment to work on this.” The doctor helped a bit but mid-July came and went without progress. I had to admit to myself that I was breaking the rules. I was not working 40 hours a week. I was not logging all my sick days—I would have to actively email the benefits team about that, and they’d dock my pay, and that just didn’t feel fair. I felt I was not being honest with Microsoft, but I reminded myself that I was being honest with my team, at least. The stress did not go away.

And then I developed a plan to kill myself and was urged by a professional to go to the ER immediately. Fortunately, his advice wasn’t a rule, so I was content to wait a few hours to make sure I informed my boss first. I wanted him to know I was trying my best.

And then I saved my life, and I spent about six weeks in intensive outpatient care, and I returned to work voluntarily at the end of August, and I’ve been back at work full-time for a couple weeks now. And I learned many things in therapy.

First and foremost, I might never be sexually assaulted again! I have spent my post-college life just wondering when the next woman would assault me, or when the old perpetrators would phase through walls to get to me. It was inevitable, I had only been lucky the past few years, and surely someone would violate my bodily autonomy yet again. But no! Nobody has done that! And I’ve been in relationships and everything! What a joyous thought. I may never have to deal with those situations ever again.

I also learned that bad things can happen even when we follow the rules. These were two and two that I had never put together. This one was a bit annoying. I wanted a way to fully avoid bad things. The rules, I felt, offered such a way. I’ve never been taught that. I just wanted it to be true so deeply that I internalized it as such. But I followed every rule I knew about. And I still had travails.

And I have learned that it is very OK to be imperfect. That helped me see that even if breaking the rules was wrong, that didn’t mean the end of the world was upon me. It just meant I had made a mistake. I could work to recover from it, and accept the consequences, and move on. What a concept. I don’t have to keep a mental tally of all my failures.

With this knowledge, I found what could replace rules: wisdom. Good judgement. I look at the situation, I consider the rules, I consider the context in which the rules were written, I consider what’s best for this scenario (not just for me!), and I make a thoughtful decision that might break the rules. I accept the consequences for my actions honestly and I move on.

This has done wonders for the general anxiety disorder I didn’t know I had!

Wynonna is fully muzzle-trained now. I walk outside calmly every day, even when I see two young children and two dogs within fifteen seconds of stepping outside my front door. She is calmer, and she can no longer eat dead animals she finds in the grass.

I committed quite recently to working on Mocha for 10 hours a week. I also had an intro with another volunteer organization. Including The Dispatch Junto, BBBS, CASA, and Bridge, that’d make five. I also keep saying I’m going to make a video game. Somehow, I can’t find the time! I got extremely stressed last week and had an awful nightmare. My girlfriend described me as overexerted. That was a fitting term. I’ve cut down my Mocha commitment and decided not to work with this new organization, even though they seem great. My life is full, sorry not sorry.

My time is spent well. I wake up happy (because I let myself play video games in the morning). I work hard, socialize joyfully, rest peacefully, and feel good about what I’ve done at the end of every day. I am, more than ever, at peace.

Happy Sunday. May peace be with you.

See also Blog - markwiemer.com