Though

John Green wrote, "But we can't know better until knowing better is useless."

Maybe this should be my mantra. I can never fully forgive myself for being so blind to the obvious and promised destruction that was the boy. Well, at least I haven't been able to forgive myself yet.
But I didn't know better.
I couldn't have known better.

Am I just telling myself that though? Could I have known better? I don't know. I don't remember. It's useless now.

Maybe not, though. Knowing better is useless to a person who never encounters the same situation again. If you never face the same problem, the solution is, in fact, useless.
This is the same philosophy most high schoolers use when viewing math--math is only useful to one who has a future in facing those types of problems ever again. The rest of us are left with useless solutions.

Maybe in this situation, though, knowing better being useless is a relief. Sure you have an irrelevant solution--but the burden of that knowledge is enough without the added weight of facing the problem again.

A friend of mine is beginning to present herself like the boy once did. And I must stop convincing myself that my knowing better is useless when, in reality, it is not, for I am unfortunately facing the problem in which I had once "uselessly" learned to know better.

But this could be a good thing, though. This whole knowing better after-the-fact actually not being useless thing.

Learning to know better was painful beyond words--that goes without being said. And maybe my knowing better being used to my own benefit (by preventing this similar--yet equally as wretched--situation from escalating to what it once became) might give the pain a hint of purpose, might ever-so-slightly ease the suffering.

Or, quite possibly, it could be what finally breaks me.

-Beaskie