“I’m not a failure, I swear. I wish you could see me from over there.”

-Rilo Kiley-

It’s very easy to judge a picture when you only have one angle. In this picture (above) it looks very much like I am terrible at parking. It looks like my car is ripe to be keyed or dented by the car next to me, angrily shoving its door into mine in a show of protest for my poor parking skills. If I saw someone parked like this, I would most certainly have a few choice words to say. I would make fun of them. I would shake my head and bemoan the state of the world. I would be up on my high horse about this idiot’s parking job.

But, sometimes there is more to the story. Maybe before you pulled up next to this idiot, parked so cavalierly crooked, there had been another car parked in a way that made this park job the only possible choice. And then that car left before you arrived.

Maybe a gang of kids had been playing in the next parking spot over and this driver was trying not to murder any of them but still needed to park and get wine for a party tomorrow and she was going to be back out in 3 minutes before she inconvenienced anyone else.

Maybe whomever painted the freaking lines on this particular parking lot did so in such a way that made it absolutely impossible for the person who ended up parking in this spot to look good from all angles if they parked there. That driver would have to just settle for looking good to only 50% of the people driving by. She had to take her chances, and hope that the right people saw she really tried to park correctly. She really did try to line everything up, be out of everyone else’s way, and park as accurately as she could.

But it didn’t matter. Because of how the lines were already drawn, long before she got there, she was always going to look like a selfish, bad-parking, idiot to a lot of people.

Luckily, there would still be some other drivers, other people, who only saw her from the better angle, and thought she was okay. She was always going to be okay in their eyes, despite what was going on with the lines drawn from the other side.

Still, others would see the entire picture and shrug. Say she did the best she could between the lines she was given. Give her the benefit of the doubt despite seeing her failures and successes all at once.