Nonjudgment Day

By Carol Keeley

/ Third Place, 2026 Plentitudes Prize in Nonfiction /

People shed their coats and shoes in silence. I scan the room before choosing a seat, to avoid fidgeters. We’re here for a retreat on Judging Mind. I’m already failing. Last time, the person next to me chuckled during meditation, scribbling notes and snacking loudly. It was a struggle not to hate, because I’m the smug literalist who once let my nose run for hours in a Zendo, motionless. 

“The judging mind sets up a moralistic framework,” the teacher says as we settle. “When things are good or bad, right or wrong. That’s one of the hallmarks of judging mind. Look for rigidity in your thinking.”

I drop my cushion with a sigh, feel exposed. There are about ninety of us, gathered in the wooden nave of a church, in the beehive of separate minds. In random moments, my father enters mine. It’s never neutral. He appears and I’m jolted by anger, then self-reproach. 

I haven’t come here to forgive my father. People keep telling me to, but that’s not why I’m here.

A woman dumps a purple cushion and blankets in front of me. Her hair is damp in the back, one hand habitually scrunching it to add more curl, which makes me like her. We’re invited to greet our neighbors. People clasp hands and smile. The purple woman twists around and eye-sweeps me tartly. I feel my body stutter, then watch my mind harden.  

“A hallmark of judging mind,” says the teacher, “is overgeneralizing. When a car cuts us off, we yell, ‘What a jerk,’ instead of saying, ‘I’m scared. That was dangerous.’ We characterize the person instead of the action.” 

As soon as the bell rings us into silence, the woman in front of me slumps, snores like a lion, jerks awake. She leans on her upright knees. Seems to be looking for ways to sleep without toppling. 

We sit in silence for 45 minutes, then a bell rings for walking meditation. After twenty minutes, the bell rings to sit again. Thoughts of my father keep surfacing. I observe the turbulence, give it space to dissipate, rest my gaze on the beige carpet, cropping my line of vision until the purple woman spills into it.

All day, I practice nonjudgment. I practice it as my neighbor nods off and jolts awake again. I practice it as I walk toward the horse ranch to the west—blue-snowed mountains behind it—then turn and walk back toward the church’s plastic jungle gym. I practice it as my father thunders into view, keeping score and sowing discord, and excoriating the oldest son, who spent decades protecting him from his own legal messes and bankruptcy. I practice it as my father insists the rehab counselors were full of shit and he never needed to go there, despite our second intervention. As he says the counselors all came to him for advice, and brags that he hasn’t had a drink in thirty years—of scotch, he adds. Wine, sure. Wine’s good for you. Everybody knows that. 

I practice while walking back toward the horses, who graze near the fence, eying the slow-motion creatures. I practice in my father’s claustrophobic new studio in assisted living, as he talks at me nonstop, plays his loop-tape of lies, while his body fills with fluid and his mind with bile. As he blames one dog-loyal secretary for his problems with the IRS.

“She wasn’t that bright, you know. She fucked up some paperwork.” 

It’s not clear if he expects me to believe this, or if it’s just something he repeats to himself, to random others, to barstool buddies. Is he hosing me with lies as a flex of some kind? Or has he transposed them for truth? The lines are blurred. Maybe they always were. 

“Another sign of judging mind,” the teacher says, “is that our ideas are cemented in certainty. There’s no fluidity, no curiosity, no willingness to question.”  

I sigh, and try to rinse my mind of thinking. I grew up in my father’s inverted reality. He’s a sun king. He’s brilliant, successful, sexy. He had just enough power to make others bend to him, within his ever-shrinking world, especially his eight kids. Now, as his control slips, it feels more dangerous. Or differently dangerous. He seems stitched together by guile, demanding that others comply. And more threatening when they don’t. 

He wears a specific grin when he lies. It seems like what matters is extorting others’ assent, not their belief. Is he feeding on my acquiescence? “Being made to repeat an obvious lie makes it clear that you’re powerless,” writes Jacob Levy, invoking Hannah Arendt. I’m unsure if my father’s deceits are essence or aging. So I stay silent, watchful. I try to be curious instead of certain.

The bell rings for walking meditation. I get up from the floor, gaze lowered, to join the slow circle of walkers. Then scoot to the single bathroom behind the sales area to be alone. A church with a tchotchke store. I splash water on my face, and note my judging mind.

Back on the cushion, I practice nonjudgment as my father berates the assisted living home’s director. She was so excited when he moved in, she tells me. Her father died when she was fourteen. Colon cancer. “He was a businessman, too,” she adds, the little girl appearing briefly. I see the bubbly daughter’s love. But my father has savaged this woman daily. Her confident ease begins to fray. 

I can also see how uprooting this move is, and how any thought of his own death is terrifying. Nothing has helped him to prepare for this juncture. 

Mid-morning, the teacher asks if there are any questions before resuming silence.

A woman with a halo of gray hair raises her hand. “Are we wrong to judge anyone at all?” she asks. “Even serial child predators?” 

I turn around to see her. Wonder if she, too, has been gripped by the young gymnasts testifying at a trial in Michigan.

“There’s a difference between judgment and discernment,” the teacher says slowly. “To judge feels powerful, even pleasurable. It can be addictive for that reason. We like to be right. But we often aren’t. And this causes suffering.”  

I face forward again, irritated by his reply. 

“The other day,” the director says, waving me into her messy office, “I left your dad’s room, came in here, locked the door and just cried.” She felt scolded and child-sized. Wept a long time before realizing it was the anniversary of her father’s death. 

My father had been shouting at her for days, some problem with the phone. He had lots of important business to tend to, he yelled. His kids dragged him here against his will and he had calls to make. And she was fucking it all up, all his important business. 

None of this was true. His business went bankrupt decades ago. And he requested this move. 

“Rage is his hobby,” I say. “It’s not about you. You’ve been great.” Getting up to leave, I add, “Oh, I forgot. Dad wants you to come see him when you can.” 

She looks frightened. “About what?”

“He didn’t say.”

“C’mon,” she begs. “Help me out. Give me something.”  

Her panic stirs me. I thought I was the only one he could disassemble.

I try not to think my father is monstrous. Maybe this is what dying looks like. Maybe this is raw fear. I try to believe there’s a good, fumbling man behind the blistering faux wizard. But my mind keeps flickering with vile slides, memories. Varieties of cruelty. 

“You have to know which wrong perceptions cause you to suffer,” said Thich Nhat Hanh. “Please write beautifully the sentence, ‘Are you sure?’ on a piece of paper and tape it to your wall.” 

“How much is a little girl worth?” asked Rachel Denhollander, a former gymnast. She was fifteen when Larry Nassar began sexually assaulting her. Repeatedly. Often in the company of her mother, whom he strategically blocked from seeing what he was doing. Just to add to the mindfuck of it. To add to her Are you sure? Later, Denhollander dared to say what hundreds of women, including Olympic athletes, knew: this man serially abused young girls. She was the first to publicly accuse him, and the last of more than 150 women to give an impact statement at his trial.

During each assault, she felt ashamed and confused, Denhollander said. But if what Nassar was doing was wrong and he did it to other children, adults would have found out and stopped him, she assured herself. So clearly his actions weren’t wrong—her feelings were. 

But Nassar’s abuse had been reported years before he began assaulting her. His crimes went unchecked for two decades. Some of his victims were as young as seven. They all questioned themselves. No one doubted him.

Because who believes little girls? Not even when there are hundreds. 

When the bell rings for walking meditation, I stand in a squall of anguish. Stumble outside for air. Anyone who thinks meditation retreats are a bliss spa has never done one.

Children “are not sufficiently consolidated” to protest violation by an adult they love and trust, writes Sándor Ferenczi. The impulse is to protect the love at any cost, to shield the family. Some children develop an over-identification with the aggressor, while others disappear into echoic behavior. The violated child “feels enormously confused” and any “confidence in the testimony of his own senses is broken,” he writes. It becomes a struggle to feel sure of anything.

Paradoxically, this is also what I strive for in meditation: to stop believing my own thoughts. To loosen certainty and solidity. To embrace not-knowing. A wound can become both a lantern and a sword. It did for Denhollander. 

Shadows seep across the floor as we sit in silence, as the sun rotates. My reactivity ebbs after hours of meditation. More foul moments surface. My youngest brother and I sit with our father in the dining hall as the director swoops in, greeting people warmly.

“Come see me before you leave,” my father yells across the room.

“I sure will,” the director says, dancing between tables. A fuzz-skulled woman in a wheelchair stretches to hug her. 

“She dresses like a fucking hooker.” My father leers, tracking her. “Jesus Christ, look at that,” he says as she bends to embrace another resident.

I recall the blanket draped over her legs in her chilly office. It’s a reflex to join his judgment. A place of seeming safety. Are you sure? He usually lauds skimpy skirts. On waitresses, for example. Or teenagers. Or me. Women who don’t cast a shadow on his power, unlike this director. 

My brother frowns at his plate, silent. I long to know what he thinks, but don’t dare ask. 

“She comes into my room and flops on my goddamned bed,” my father says, stabbing me with the same glare he’s giving her. “What the hell is that?” 

He’s said this repeatedly for days. Maybe she needed to sit. He’s in a small studio. I have no idea what he thinks it means or why he’d read something vile into it. 

Are you sure?

It could be that he comes from a crumbling world, where men remove hats when they enter a home and dress up to fly and stand when a woman approaches their table in a restaurant. Is this his objection? Maybe sitting on a bed is too informal or disrespectful for him. Maybe it violates his sense of status. Or he thinks she’s flirting, which he usually relishes. I can’t devein his hatred, but it sizzles. And it seeks women. 

“They said they’d give me a tour of the place. Has anyone done that?” he says. “They haven’t done a goddamned thing they said they would.” 

 I sip cloudy water. “Have you asked for a tour, Dad?” 

“That’s not the point,” he snaps. “Goddam it. She left! Fucking coward.”

“No, she keeps getting intercepted,” I say. “She’s there, by the window.”

But he’s pitched in fury. When director nears our table, he erupts. Shouts incoherently. Heads pivot. The director looks puzzled. 

“I’m not sure what you’re asking,” she says. 

“That’s the goddamned problem. I can’t reach you,” he yells. “Nobody gave me any fucking information when I got here.” 

“I’m sorry. There was a handbook in your room—”

“I’m telling you there wasn’t. You fucked that up, too.”

I mangle my napkin as my brother stares at his hands. Surely he is finding this as hard to tolerate as I am. 

“Well, we just had more printed,” the director says brightly, “so I’ll make sure to drop that off for you. I’m sorry. I wish I’d known.”

“You don’t know anything because I have no way to reach you.” He’s still shouting. The room has gone quiet. “Nobody’s done a damned thing for me.” 

“I know how to reach her, Dad,” I say. “It’s been on dozens of emails you’ve gotten. I’ll send you the info.”

“You stay out of this,” he barks. “This is my business.” 

“There are other ways to handle it,” I say quietly. The director is beckoned by a staffer and leaves. I can feel my adrenalized heart. 

“I’ve got my own game plan,” my father says, suddenly calm. “I know what I’m doing.” 

“You definitely have a game.” I sense my brother’s discomfort. I never talk back to our father. No one does.

“This is how I do things. I’m not going to change now.” He spoons soup.

“Yes,” I say. “That’s very clear.”

His rage used to unhouse me. I would tremble and obey, lose my outline entirely. I don’t know why I’m not doing that now. His abuse of this woman feels pathological. And not new. Maybe its bald visibility, its happening outside the sealed family system, is what unsettles me. I feel closer to her entrapment than his fury. 

Or maybe I don’t shrink because his power is waning. He seems rattled by death’s proximity. Death and impermanence. He has never entertained either. How could he possibly be good at dying? He’s probably terrified. Rage is the weapon fear tends to wield. 

I open a package of Saltines, shift to a neutral tone. “Do you really not have the handbooks she mentioned?” 

“Probably in a drawer,” he says, taking the cracker I offer him. “I hate having shit on my desk. But that’s not the point.”

Right, I think. The point is dominance. The point is to make her fear him, to treat him as a sun king still. The transparency of this move stuns me. It is who he has always been, laid bare. 

Are you sure?

I sit on a cushion, feel the banging of my heart, my thundering blood, embarrassed that I’ve gotten so lost in this memory. Feeling its cost.

“Listen for the tone of your thought,” the teacher interrupts the silence. “Is it calm and curious? Then it’s probably not judgmental. Question the thoughts that stress you out.”

The afternoon hours crawl as I ride these rough waters. As I see the thoughts that stress me out. It’s upsetting to see how hijacked I am by flashes of my father. Breathe, I tell myself. And don’t believe everything you think. 

As I wheel my father to dinner one dusk, he berates each person we pass. A

kitchen worker in a hairnet freezes, looks scared. I give her an apologetic look. 

“Geez, Dad,” I exhale. 

“Fuck it,” he says. “I’d rather have people fear me than love me. Always did.” 

I know this isn’t true. He craved love. He was parched for it. But the liar is afraid, said Adrienne Rich. The liar prefers a controllable connection. These rage displays feed him something. 

“The desire to be powerful is rooted in the intensity of fear,” writes bell hooks.

“Power gives us the illusion of having triumphed over fear, over our need for love.” 

As a child, I loved my father deeply. I saw his suffering. The only son of a twice-knighted patriarch and an icy mother. A spoiled yet neglected child who fathered eight. Unhealed. Unhinged. I could hold his darkness and his light, the multiplicity of him. For years, I sat on the floor by his chair, absorbing his stories, bathing him in love. 

That’s a child’s heart. It was easy once.

I don’t know when it began to feel more effortful. When it became more about safety than love. 

Home from a rough visit with my father, I hike with a friend. As we walk, I ask him about personality disorders. He’s done psychiatric intake in emergency rooms, has a glowing heart. Any diagnostic label, he says gently, creates a bias. We see what confirms it. Whether we call it a personality disorder or narcissism or alcoholism doesn’t matter. Such patterns are set in motion early. They’re often developmental. We’ll never know what our parents’ childhoods were like. We can’t know what wired them, what happened to them.

Pausing beneath spiraling hawks, my friend says that narcissistic personality disorders are nearly impossible to treat. And they are not the person’s fault. 

“What happens is the person splits,” he explains, cupping imaginary globes in each hand, “and all the insecurity and fragility go into this self,” he bobs one hand, “while the other self bloats and bullies in order to protect the fragile part. Over time, it becomes impossible to address the insecure core because it’s too threatening. It threatens a shaky composition of self. It feels annihilating.”

This makes bruised sense. I feel a bud of compassion, especially when he says it’s often the result of severe neglect or abuse in early childhood. My grandfather was venerated, driven, highly critical. His only son never seemed to earn his approval. 

Maybe it makes sense, then, to prefer being feared to being loved. We can’t control whether someone loves us. Much as he craved it. And being feared asks much less of us than love does. It’s easy to imagine that he’s protecting the fragile self, split off long ago. 

And me? I’m too late to protect the little girl. I’m afraid to even look at her. 

Denhollander’s impact statement at the trial in Michigan went viral. It was a crescendo of courage, as well as a disquisition on justice. But what made headlines was that she forgave him. Not her tireless work to expose this sexual predator, plus the many who’d colluded to protect him. Not the years she spent documenting Nassar’s cunning abuse of hundreds, his child porn, his lack of remorse. His final letter to the Court insisted he was the victim here.

After all that, the spotlight fell on Denhollander’s forgiveness.

Good girls forgive, is the messaging. Good girls don’t judge. Good girls don’t get angry and they certainly don’t seek to avenge. It makes it easier for others when little girls forgive. 

We break for lunch in silence, drifting downstairs to the kitchen area. There’s a tray full of mismatched mugs we’re invited to use. I watch my judgment flare over how long someone holds the fridge door open, people chatting too loudly, flirty men. Even the mugs incite strong emotions. I struggle to pick one. Judging mind loves to compare and to label. Good and bad. Wanted, unwanted, the teacher said. I move outside with my sack lunch and sit facing the mountains, trying to breathe. 

“All my life, I made fun of fat people,” my father says, then indicates his own sloshing body—water-weight from his failing kidneys. “Now look at me.” 

I wait, hoping for an insight, but he says nothing else. 

He uses an office chair to roll from his couch to the bathroom. Refuses to use a wheelchair my first week of visiting. The monstrous pride of a man who believes death should fear him. Later his youngest son, here for his third visit of the day, stands to say goodbye. My father jabs him in the belly, scowling.

Judging others isn’t just a way to feel superior, writes John Welwood. “In judging them, I neutralize their power over me.” And this is where “we see the wound at work: Judging and condemning others is an attempt to avoid experiencing the pain and fear of not feeling loved.”  

 Our judgment often reveals the shadow—the rejected parts of ourselves. Exiled parts can become very dangerous. 

I’ve been accused of judging my father. This is sticky terrain for all who were scarred by him. But judgment isn’t what I feel. My shame is too cellular for that. My struggle is to forgive. 

I book another visit, worried about my care-worn brother. My father talks nonstop at me for days. The stories are mostly familiar, but some I haven’t heard. Like how one boss admired him so much, he recommended my father for a job elsewhere. When his new boss asked where he saw himself in five years, my father said, “Your seat looks good to me.” 

He smirks, relishing himself as this cocky young man. I don’t ask why a boss who admired him so much would ship him off to another job. I don’t protest as he blames others for his bankruptcies, for his environmental crimes and EPA fines, the IRS catastrophes, the failure of his company. I never mention the ankle bracelet he wore on house arrest. His long defunct factory is now a superfund site, it’s so toxic. Growing up, we moved every year or two as he changed jobs, as the family kept expanding. Was this ambition, as he claims, or a trail of getting fired? 

Some still echo my father’s version of himself. That he wasn’t a drunk, for example. That he ran a successful company. It’s possible a boss recommended him for another job, one brother observes, since there was a ceiling for Catholics at Ford at that time. That hadn’t occurred to me. 

I listen, not knowing what is true. Knowing I can’t know. 

Are you sure?

Dying has a way of peeling back all our armor. Being a ‘no other gods before me’ sort of father hasn’t kept mine from dwindling into this shabby room, down a maze of hallways that reek of canned soup and sadness. 

My indomitable grandfather died on the bathroom floor. After a heart attack knocked him off the toilet, he called out to my grandmother for hours: “I’m going, Tess. I’m going.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” his wife complained from the den. “The doctor said you can’t.” 

Years ago, on retreat, a Tibetan lama said that anger charged with aggression always comes from the ego. But anger itself is just an energy, he said, and carries wisdom. I see this in the brave young gymnasts at the trial in Michigan. There’s clarity in their anger, and a powerful calm, unlike my father’s. Aggression silences through fear. But the anger of these young women undid both the fear and the silencing. 

Are you sure? This question can be a tool for abusers, especially of young women and girls. But it is also the pathway for healing. I peel that quote from my wall and pin up another: What would you write if you weren’t afraid?

I’m sitting beside my father in the dining hall, where he refuses to speak to other residents. He looks down on them for being where he is. Some days, my visits feel anthropological. 

He thinks I’m here as daughter-wife, as devoutly blank scribe. But I’ve come to protect my brother, and because I want to know, once and for all, who this man is. My father. He merits understanding. And he is the force who shaped me. There’s no way to know how some parents acquired the flaws that steered them into wreckage, with us in tow. But this is my last chance to try. So I sit, listening.

And on retreat, I practice nonjudgment. I practice it as the dozing woman spills into view and the teacher disappoints. I practice it as my father bursts into my forehead, full of ugly rage and contempt. I practice thinking of sour moments as actions, as conditioning. Not as my father. 

It’s easy to see why a good girl’s forgiveness was the headline, versus what Kyle Stephens said. She was six when Nassar first molested her. He penetrated her, masturbated in front of her, rubbed her feet on his penis, then convinced her parents she was lying. When her father realized he’d defended his daughter’s rapist for years, instead of believing her, he killed himself. Stephens relayed all this in the courtroom, before telling Nassar that “little girls don't stay little forever. They grow into strong women that return to destroy your world."

Denhollander, a devout Christian, noted that her forgiveness was widely praised, especially from pulpits. Some even called it Godly, she said. But not one person said “how Godly it was to pursue justice.”

Justice only threatens a world spun from lies. 

I wheel my father to an event for Veterans Day. Sitting on the floor beside him, I grow anxious about how awful the speaker is and dread my father’s rising bile, another explosive scene. His hand drops into my hair and I flinch. That’s the only semi-tender moment we have. A misread caress. 

The biological paradox, they call it. When the person you’re wired to seek for comfort terrifies you. When you have to comply to be safe, and never actually are. It’s like paying the mob for protection from their violence. For years, I paid my father in persuasive love and compliance to earn protection from the threat he was. To all of us. 

Everyone paid in different currencies. Some in excellence. Some in mirroring. Some in financial support. Mine happened to be the upward-gazing love of a young, pliable girl. One who would doubt herself instead. The favorite drug of certain men. 

I learned early to question my certainty, to smother my instincts. I was taught that love had a nerve-center of terror and mistrust. That love was a thing that could explode without warning. That love could become its obliterating opposite. That certain men got to define what love was. Not you.  

I’m sitting with two friends on high metal stools, sipping coffees. Talking about how haunted Christmas is and how complicated family. I mention the layers of narratives in mine. How I know my perception is flawed. They are nodding, listening so intently their faces ripple with feeling. I agree with Jung’s claim that “truth, if it exists, is a concert of many voices.” A truer portrait of my family would include more versions than just mine, I insist. Suddenly they bloom identical frowns.

“Some truths are a concert of many voices,” P repeats thoughtfully, “but there’s no gradation of truth that what your father did to you was wrong.”

“Completely,” echoes D.

“It was wrong. It was abusive. It was a misuse of power,” he says. “There’s no grey there.”

“Absolutely,” says D.

“Right?” I say in a tiny voice, tentative, feeling tears rise up as they insist. Insist on the truth of a little girl’s worthiness. 

Any person who harms another without guilt—especially a child—has “lost the ability to truly love,” said Denhollander in that Michigan courtroom.

Then she addressed her abuser directly: “You could have had everything you pretended to be. Every woman who stood up here truly loved you as an innocent child, real genuine love for you, and it did not satisfy.” 

My love for my father was true in moments, and who he was under the gaze of that love was also true. There were times that I felt sure he saw me, too. Maybe we all become, however briefly, what love sees. A loving gaze is a kind of mutual alchemy. He was a dazzling story teller, a jazz lover, a wit. He could read people, which made him capable of attunement, as well as cruelty. In moments, I did see the good and loving man at his core. 

Maybe what he most needed from me was that seeing. 

I resist seeing my father as only evil. And some days I struggle to see him as ever having been good. I cherish the Buddhist view that our true nature is pure, filled with wisdom and compassion. Life plasters us with injuries that give rise to habits of mind. This is what shows up as flaws—not essence, but imprints. Our work is to rinse away the mud of our misperceptions, our habits of reactivity. It’s a radical view, but a deeply comforting one. When I can view my father through this lens, I can touch a child’s love again. I think this is what Denhollander accessed. It’s what gave her such capacity and courage.

Ultimately, more than two hundred women submitted impact statements in Nassar’s trial. They reclaimed who they were before being told: this isn’t wrong—you are. 

After eight hours of sitting, the body begins to seize up, causing the mind to mutiny. I do more walking meditation. I walk slowly, feeling the grass beneath my bare feet. An older man near the playground does the same. His slow, careful steps take him up the blue plastic kid’s slide. He pauses at the top, before sliding down it. 

I drop my gaze, filled with giggles. 

I sit, first as whirlwind, then—over the course of several days—as post-storm serenity. I don’t sit to judge or forgive or resolve, just to breathe. One day I will return to the child he wasn’t allowed to be either. 

“To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt,” writes David Whyte. So I sit, expanding into the woman who protects an abused assisted living director, and the betrayed child, and the wounded father.

I try to revive a child’s trust in love. 

It hurts.