When I read your subtitle, "We don’t deserve them until we can behave better," I assumed you meant writers don't deserve to write them. That's something I think about a lot as a writer: e.g., "Is this story mine to tell?" "Have I earned it?" "Are my motivations correct?" "What will the consequences be for others?" and so on.

You brought in a different idea, though: Readers don't deserve to read these essays unless we (as readers) receive them with gratitude and respect for the authors. That's important for us (as writers) to remember, because all of us who are writers are also readers, so we have to behave well as readers. When it comes to our own essays, we must anticipate that not all of our readers will behave well toward us. And maybe that means we write a bit less, or we write differently, or we publish in another context, or we save it for years until we're ready to publish it.