First Verdict

I don’t know how long I slept. The last thing I remember is a half empty teacup and the Hatter’s laugh. When I opened my eyes, the table was gone. The Hatter was gone. The rabbit was gone. A few soldiers stood around me. Their faces were playing cards. Their spears pointed at me. This piece is inspired by the moment in Alice where she is arrested and brought before the Queen of Hearts. In the film, she ends up at the Queen’s castle, and earlier, at the tea party, the Hatter and March Hare give her a piece of chocolate and she shrinks into a teapot. I took those scenes and turned them inward. I didn’t know where I was, or what I had done, or why I had been arrested. But the strangest part was that I already felt guilty. Before anyone had accused me of anything. That feeling wasn’t new. I’ve done this before. Before anyone has an opinion about me, I run through every possible judgment in my head. I prepare explanations for things I haven’t said yet. I fear mistakes I haven’t made. I get ready to defend myself against people who may never have planned to judge me at all. Now I was standing among faceless soldiers, and the same thing was happening again. One of them pushed his spear forward. I wanted to ask what I had done wrong. But something inside me insisted I must have done something. Maybe I hadn’t been good enough. Maybe I had said the wrong thing somewhere. Maybe I hadn’t behaved the way others expected. And maybe that was the problem. That I always assumed I had to match what others expected. I looked at the cards. Hearts. Diamonds. Spades. Clubs. Each one had a different mark, but they all behaved the same. None of them had a face I could read. I thought about how strange it is to fear the judgment of people you don’t even really know. For years I tried to build an acceptable version of myself. Talented. Successful. Strong. Lovable. The more I worked on that image, the more afraid I became of it breaking. Sometimes it was enough for someone not to praise my work for me to question everything I had built. Sometimes one small mistake could occupy my mind for hours. Sometimes I was so afraid of being judged that I preferred to do nothing at all. At the tea party, for a moment, I had accepted that not everything has to be perfect. Now I understood that accepting this next to a mad Hatter is much easier than believing it under someone else’s gaze. I looked at the soldiers. Their spears were still pointed at me. I didn’t know where they were taking me, or who would decide what happened to me. But for the first time, before I started explaining, I asked myself: Why do I always think I have to prove my innocence, even when I don’t know what I’ve been accused of? Maybe the scariest part of this trial wasn’t the soldiers or their spears. Maybe it was that I had built a courtroom in my own mind years before I ever arrived here. A courtroom where I was the accused, the witness, and the judge. And worse than that, I almost always delivered the verdict before I had even heard my own defense. I still don’t know who sent these soldiers. But this time I decided that before I accept any charge, I would at least ask what crime I had committed. Maybe for the first time, I wasn’t going to condemn myself just because others might. And with that thought, I started walking with them. I didn’t know who was waiting at the end of the path. I only hoped that this time, before any verdict, I would have a chance to be heard.