On the door of a local store in our town square, there are cheerful, aspirational slogans printed in tidy, modern fonts. Among them:

“Do something with joy, or not at all.”

“Beauty is not trivial.”

“Every product should have a story.”

Inside, the vibe is curated optimism: plants, candles, linen that whispers wellness. But then… right out front on a rack by the entrance, there is a jacket.

Across the back of the jacket, in glittery, shouty block letters, it reads: “DON’T BE A LITTLE B*TCH.”

Every time I pass it, my body reacts before my brain does. A spike of heat. A tightening in the chest. It isn’t just the word. It’s the casual ugliness of it. Mean. Sexist. Performatively confrontational. And frankly, the jacket itself looks like something that’s been rejected from the wardrobe department of a local production of Grease.

What makes it worse is the location. There’s a girls’ high school right around the corner. You constantly see students in uniform walking by. Including my two godchildren.

Which means that every morning, this jacket is quietly telling a story of its own. And it is not the kind of story I imagine the founders had in mind when they wrote Every product should have a story on the front door.

Then last week, on my way to get coffee, my annoyance triumphed, and I finally went inside.

“Hey,” I said to the young man behind the counter. “Can I ask you about that jacket outside?”

He didn’t look up from his phone. “What jacket?”

“The one with the nasty slogan on the back,” I said.

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Well,” I said, “it kind of goes against the whole spirit of your store. You know. Joy. Beauty. Story. And there’s a school right around here. A lot of kids walk past this window every day.”

“Okay.”

I waited.

Nothing.

“So… is someone in charge of what goes in the window?” I asked.

“Okay.”

At this point something snapped into place inside me. The righteous cape flapped off my shoulders.

I said, sharper now, “You know, there’s a very simple policy most grownups operate by. It’s called: We don’t use sexist language.”

“Okay.”

My jaw tightened. My voice hardened. Finally, I said, “Well, you’re sure doing your part to make this block worse.”

He looked at me and said, calmly, “Okay.”

And then, in a moment I am not proud of, I mimicked him.

“Okay,” I said back.

Flat. Petty. Accurate.

Then I did it again.

“Okay.”

And again.

“Okay. Okay. Okay.”

That’s when I left. Not gracefully. In a huff. Banging into a rack of hand-woven scarves from the Andes on my way out.

By the time I reached the coffee shop, my nervous system was buzzing. I hadn’t ruined my day exactly. But I had definitely bruised it. I stood there vibrating with self-righteous adrenaline, replaying the exchange and rewriting my lines.

Now, I was absolutely right. That jacket was ugly. The message was sexist. The placement was irresponsible.

And yet being right is exactly what put me in danger of being wrong.

The Emotional High of Being Correct

There is a particular rush that comes from moral correctness. Not big, abstract justice. I mean the small, daily righteousness. The kind that shows up when your friend is late again, or when someone speaks carelessly, and you feel the moral spotlight swing toward you.

Ah, yes. This is my moment.

Because when I am technically correct, emotionally justified, and socially supported in my irritation, I become my least generous self. It’s my righteous posture. It looks upright. It feels principled. And it quietly corrodes connection.

Being Nice to Nice People Is Easy

Most of us confuse basic decency with virtue. We are kind to kind people. Patient with reasonable people. Compassionate with those who apologize quickly and in the right tone.

That is not spiritual practice. That is good manners.

The real work begins when someone is late, defensive, distracted, emotionally unavailable, or clumsy with language. When they mess up and then fail to clean it up in the pleasing way we prefer.

That is when the ego perks up.

Because now I get to be right.

When Helping Turns Into Power

In my book Easy Street: A Story of Redemption from Myself, I tell the story of becoming the legal representative of a neurodiverse woman five years older than me who was facing the possibility of being unhoused.

There is a moment where it looks like I finally secure her an apartment. And then she blows it. And I lose it.

I yell, “You would be homeless if it weren’t for me.”

It still makes me flinch. The thing was: It was true. I was not required to help her. I was not family. I volunteered. I had made calls. Filled out paperwork. Navigated systems.

And that is exactly why the moment was so dangerous. Because righteousness had quietly turned into leverage.

In the book, I describe it as “the scene that would never make the Lifetime movie trailer. The part where the helper becomes the villain in her own origin story.”

I was right.

And I was using that rightness like a weapon.

The Addictive Glow of Moral Superiority

There is a dopamine hit in justified irritation.

When I’m right, I become a prosecutor. I assemble evidence. I rehearse tone. I imagine the moment when my calm delivery will finally make the other person understand and also admire me.

This fantasy has never once produced peace.

Here’s the paradox I keep missing: When you are genuinely in the right, you don’t actually have to do very much. Right has gravity. It works over time. It does not require escalation, performance, or verbal domination. In fact, the more you thrash around trying to enforce it, the more you undercut it.

When I insist on proving I’m right, I stop benefiting from being right. The moment I decide someone “should know better,” I stop seeing them as human and start seeing them as a walking violation of a universal law—who must be apprehended.

What I Wish I’d Said

If I could rewind the scene, keep the truth but drop the righteousness, it might have sounded more like this:

“Hey. I don’t want to be confrontational. I just wanted to flag that slogan. With the schools nearby, it lands differently than you might expect. I figured you’d want to know.”

No cape.

No performance.

No moral microphone drop.

Just information. Offered gently. Human to human.

The Small Heroism of Restraint

We celebrate dramatic moral acts: speaking truth, drawing lines, standing up.

But there is a quieter heroism that rarely gets applause. Not escalating when you could. Not humiliating when you are justified. Not turning correctness into theater.

Sometimes the bravest move is not saying the smartest thing you thought of in the shower. Sometimes the most radical act is staying kind while being right. Which, frankly, is much harder than being smug while correct.

The real question, I’m coming to see, is not if I’m right. But “What kind of person do I become when I am?”