wash your goddamn dishes

on being slowly bled to death by people who expect you to like them anyway

tl;dr: inconsideration isn't passive. it's a series of tiny power moves where someone decides, without asking, that their comfort matters more than your existence. this essay is about the thousand paper cuts of being treated like you're not real. and why you're allowed to finally stop pretending it doesn't hurt.

Photo by kevin turcios on Unsplash

i.

the dishes have been in the sink for four days.

i know it’s been four days because i’ve been counting. meticulously.

why? because that’s what you do when you’re trying to convince yourself you’re not being unreasonable. you gather evidence. you build a case. you prepare for the trial that will happen inside your own head where you are both prosecutor and defendant.

four days. crusted egg yolk. discarded shrimp in the floor and sink. something that was once oatmeal... maybe? the counters are a slick mess of oil and stains and cockroaches. a pan with what i can only describe as a crime scene of burnt cheese. and the smell… dios mío, the smell. sour and rotting and accusatory.

my roommate is not here. my roommate is at brunch, or with his judgmental lawyer friends, or living his main character life somewhere that isn’t this kitchen. but now, i’m standing here in my pajamas at 11am on a saturday, having a small existential crisis over dishes that aren’t mine.

here’s the thing that keeps circling my brain like a fly that won’t land: he made this decision for me.

he decided, without consulting me, that i would live with this. that i would either clean his mess or exist in it. those are my options. either way, i lose something. my time or my peace. my labor or my sanity. he got to leave the dishes and leave the apartment and leave me holding the bag of his thoughtlessness.

and if i say something? if i text him, hey, the dishes? then i’m the one making it weird. i’m the nag. the uptight one. the person who can’t just chill. one more story to shit talk to his friends about.

and this is such a small thing. i know it’s a small thing. that’s what makes it so effective.

ii.

let me tell you about paper cuts.

one paper cut is nothing. you wince, you suck your finger, you move on. two paper cuts, same thing, right? annoying but very much survivable. you don’t even mention it to anyone because who complains about paper cuts? that would be ridiculous! that would be… dramatic.

but here’s what happens with paper cuts: they accumulate.

by the fiftieth paper cut, your hands are a mess of tiny wounds.

by the hundredth, you’re bleeding from places you didn’t know could bleed.

and the wild thing is, you still can’t point to any single cut and say “this one. this is the one that broke me.” because it wasn’t one. it was all of them. it was the accumulation.

inconsideration works the same way.

one person doesn’t hold the door. fine. one person talks over you in a meeting. okay. one person cancels plans last minute. sure. one person plays their phone on speaker in a quiet coffee shop. whatever. one person lets their dog off-leash and it runs up on you. it’s fine, it’s fine, everything is fine.

except it’s not one person. it’s everyone. it’s constant.

this is the texture of daily life in a world where people have collectively decided that everyone else is an NPC.

you know NPCs, right? non-player characters. the background people in video games. they exist to serve your story, to give you quests or sell you potions or just populate the world so it doesn’t feel empty. they don’t have inner lives. they don’t have needs. they’re not real.

this is how people treat each other now. like NPCs. like everyone else exists as a backdrop to their main character moment.

the person blasting music on the subway isn’t thinking about the forty other people in the car. those people aren’t real to them. they’re scenery. the person who leaves their shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot isn’t thinking about the next person who needs that spot. that person is theoretical, abstract, basically fictional.

and it’s not that these individuals are monsters. most of them would probably help you if you collapsed in front of them. it’s that in the ordinary moments, the mundane daily transactions, they’ve stopped registering other people as fully real.

you’re just a shape they have to move around. an obstacle or an audience. never a protagonist in your own right.

iii.

i’ve been thinking about why this bothers me so much. beyond the dishes, beyond the subway music, beyond all the small daily erosions. and i think it’s this:

every act of inconsideration is a tiny colonization.

stay with me, please.

colonization, at its core, is someone deciding that their desires matter more than your existence. that they can plant their flag in your space, extract what they want, and leave you to deal with the aftermath. that your land, your labor, your life is raw material for their project.

scale that down... like way the fuck down… to a sink full of dishes.

my roommate planted his flag in our kitchen. he extracted convenience from shared space and he left me to deal with the aftermath. and if i object, i’m the one disrupting the peace.

this is the same logic. the same grammar. just a different magnitude.

and listen, i know someone is already typing “you can’t compare dirty dishes to actual colonization.” and sure, fine, they’re not equivalent in harm. but they’re the same shape. the same assumption. the same sentence structure where someone else gets to be the subject and you get to be the object.

i do what i want. you deal with it.

this is why it scales so easily. why the same person who leaves their dishes for their roommate to handle can also talk about immigrants like they’re a math problem. “how many can we absorb?” “what’s the economic impact?” numbers, not people. populations, not personas. the humanity abstracted out until what’s left is just a logistics question. a clinical thought exercise with no real human value.

they’re not thinking about the mother who walked three thousand miles with her children. they’re not thinking about the family who lost everything to a war they didn’t start. those people aren’t real to them. just shapes on a graph, NPCs at the border.

same logic. same grammar. different scale.

iv.

here’s where it gets really fun.

so you’ve been absorbing these paper cuts. hundreds of them. thousands, maybe. you’ve been the bigger person. you’ve let things go. you’ve breathed through it. you’ve told yourself it’s not worth the conflict, not worth the energy, not worth being “that person.”

and then one day… you just fucking snap.

maybe it’s the dishes. maybe it’s the fourth time someone cancels on you. maybe it’s a comment that isn’t even that bad, objectively, but it lands on top of all the other comments and suddenly you’re crying in a target parking lot or screaming at your roommate about a pan.

and what happens then?

you’re the crazy one.

you’re “overreacting.” you’re “making it a big deal.” you’re “so sensitive.” you’re “emotional.” you need to “calm down.” you need to “relax.” you need to understand that it’s “not that serious.”

this is the trap. this is the part that makes me want to tear my hair out.

the structure is designed so that the person who finally reacts looks insane.

because any single instance is defensible. “it’s just dishes.” “i was just running late.” “i didn’t mean it like that.” every paper cut, in isolation, is nothing. plausibly deniable. barely worth mentioning. and so you’re not allowed to mention the accumulation. you’re not allowed to say “this is the thousandth time” because that sounds crazy. that sounds like you’ve been keeping score. that sounds like you have a problem.

and maybe you have been keeping score. because that’s what happens when you’re bleeding. you start tracking the wounds. you start building the case. you become a prosecutor in your own head because no one else is going to validate that you’re actually being harmed.

this is how they gaslight you.

not with lies, exactly. with scale. with isolation. with the insistence that each cut be evaluated independently, as if there’s no pattern, as if it’s not the same knife every time.

“why are you so upset about dishes?”

because it’s not about the dishes, pendejo. it’s about the fact that i don’t exist to you.

it’s about the fact that my time, my space, my peace, my actual presence in this apartment means nothing. it’s about the accumulated weight of being treated like i’m not real.

but try explaining that. try explaining that while you’re angry crying about a pan.

v.

the myth of the high road has done so much damage.

you know this one… “be the bigger person.” “don’t stoop to their level.” “kill them with kindness.” “living well is the best revenge.”

it sounds wise! it even sounds… mature? it sounds like the kind of thing a person with good boundaries would say.

but here’s what it actually means in practice: absorb the harm. don’t react. don’t name it. don’t make it weird.

the high road is a trick. it’s a way of getting you to police yourself so they don’t have to. it’s outsourcing the labor of conflict avoidance to the person being harmed. you do the work of staying calm, staying quiet, staying reasonable, while they get to keep being thoughtless with no consequences.

and the kicker? the high road doesn’t even work.

people don’t respect you more for being endlessly accommodating. they respect you less. they learn that you’ll absorb whatever they do, so they do more. the high road teaches people that you’re a safe target. that you won’t fight back. that they can extract from you indefinitely.

i’ve been on that road for years. decades, maybe. i was raised on it. good puerto rican boy, don’t make waves, ten respeto, be gracious, be patient, be the kind of person who doesn’t cause problems.

and you know what i got for it? a reputation for being easy. for being flexible. for being the one who would always understand, always accommodate, always make it work.

which meant everyone else’s needs came first, always. because edgard will figure it out. edgard won’t mind. edgard is soooooo chill.

i’m not fucking chill!

i’ve never been chill. i’ve just been performing chill while dying inside. smiling while bleeding. being the bigger person while getting smaller and smaller.

ya no más.

vi.

i need to be honest about something: i’ve been inconsiderate too.

i’ve been the one who left the dishes. well, maybe not literally. okay, sometimes literally. but also metaphorically.

i’ve canceled plans last minute. i’ve been so caught up in my own stuff that i forgot to ask how someone else was doing. i’ve taken up space without thinking about who i was displacing.

this isn’t a confession designed to seem balanced. it’s just true. and i think it matters because the point isn’t that there are good people and bad people, considerate people and inconsiderate people. the point is that we’ve built a world that makes inconsideration easy and invisible.

the question isn’t “am i a good person?”, the question is “am i treating the people around me like they’re real?”

like they have inner lives. like they have needs that exist even when i’m not looking. like their time matters, their space matters, their peace matters.

not in a guilt spiral way. not in a way that makes you anxious and paralyzed. just… are you seeing people? or are they NPCs in your story?

i ask myself this now. like, when i’m about to leave something for someone else to deal with. when i’m about to cancel. when i’m about to be loud or take up space or assume my needs come first.

is this person real to me right now?

it’s a simple question. it’s completely changed how i move through the world.

vii.

so where does this leave us?

here’s what i want you to take from this, if you take anything:

you’re allowed to stop absorbing.

you’re allowed to say something about the dishes. you’re allowed to not be the bigger person. you’re allowed to have a reaction that matches the accumulated harm, not just the single incident. you’re allowed to stop performing chill when you’re actually bleeding.

the people who call you crazy, who call you dramatic, who insist it’s not that serious? they’re the ones who benefited from your silence. of course they don’t want you to speak up. your compliance was convenient for them.

your reaction is not the problem.

the pattern is the problem. the thousand cuts are the problem. the culture that treats consideration as optional and your objection as pathological. that’s the problem. not you. not your tears. not your anger.

you’re not alone in this.

if this essay is resonating, if you’re nodding along, if you’re thinking about your own sink full of dishes, your own accumulated cuts. you’re not the only one. we’re all bleeding from different versions of the same wound.

and maybe that’s where it starts. naming it. seeing it. refusing to accept that this is just how things are.

because it doesn’t have to be. we used to assume that other people were real. we used to move through the world with the basic expectation that we’d be seen, considered, treated like we mattered. that’s not some impossible utopia. it’s just. consideration. it’s just remembering that other people exist.

well… the dishes aren’t in the sink anymore. the rotting food and the cockroaches and the slime and the sticky floors are gone.

because i cleaned them. again.

i’m going to say something. this is not because i expect it to fix anything. but because i’m done pretending it doesn’t matter. done being the bigger person. done absorbing.

he made his decision, now i get to make mine.

for the love of fucking god, please… take care of each other out there. and wash your goddamn dishes.

te quiero, mi gente.

edgard 💖

what’s been cutting you lately? the comment section is open. let’s name it together.

p.s. if you’re someone who leaves dishes in the sink: this is your sign. just wash them. it takes three minutes. the people you live with are real. they have feelings. they’ve been counting the days.

if any of this resonated, you can buy me a coffee. no pressure. no subscription. just a one-time “thanks for existing” if you feel like it.