Hi, I want to tell you a secret. This may come as a shock to many people and to some people it will be par for the course. When it comes to my actions and how I treat people close to me, I am not a good person. A lot of people who know me would probably beg to differ and while I may not agree with what you have to say, I will fight to the point of some inconvenient pain your right to say it. For anyone who thinks I am not telling the truth I want to ask you a few things. What if I told you I am someone who hurt his mother and family? What if I told you that I did not tell my mother “Happy Mother’s Day” due to the fact that I have not been talking to my mother? What if I told you that I knew a woman who was in love with me and all i reciprocated that love with was pain and hurt? What if I told you I contemplated kicking my family out of the house I bought them and selling it with no cares to where they end up? What if I told you I didn’t even tell my mother that her baby boy was leaving the country for his birthday or even gave her his new address; nonetheless told her he moved? You would probably think these are the actions of a bad person and I assure you they are all true and not the least of my actions which can be labeled as those of a bad person. Well I am here today to speak personally about some things I am learning about being an adult, and let me tell you something, adulting is hard… but not only in the ways you always hear people mention.
I would be willing to bet three entire bitcoins that anyone reading this has heard some variation of the phrase “adulting is hard”. Generally, the people who say this are referring to paying bills, managing finances, dating, finding balance with social lives vs working lives, and a slew of other things. While I take nothing from these people, I am learning that adulting is truly hard because of how eye opening it is to the actions of not only your family members, but yourself as well. You see, part of growing up is realizing that the pedestal that a lot of us may put our parents on is essentially that. A pedestal WE put THEM on. When we age and start to do things on our own, we start to realize how toxic or non-conducive some behaviors are to us. We may start to see that our parents are not as perfect as we think they are. We may realize how some of the things they do or did impacted our lives and we start to think about the ways we might do things differently if we started our own family. Sometimes we start to realize how damaged our parents truly are and how that plays out in their actions. What is most frightening to me is how we can sometimes see these flaws or cracks in the foundation in ourselves. This is where adulting gets very difficult. We start to label people as bad or good, and we impose these same labels on us. Whether they be false images of self or brutal realizations of truth, as you become an adult you start to realize just how much YOUR actions impact people because you realize how much other’s actions have and currently do impact you.
The biggest problem with us realizing how good or bad of people we or anyone else is is our criteria we judge on. Most often people judge good or bad actions on a right and wrong basis. We get so hung up on right and wrong that we start to think of ourselves as bad people because we might do things that people consider “wrong”. We might know someone who is trash as a person on a micro level, but their actions on a macro level are deemed “right” and so they are considered “good”. So what do we do when we find ourselves labeling others and beating ourselves up about being a good or bad person? We seek understanding.
A good friend told me recently that people get so hung up on right and wrong when none of that matters. That really resonated with me because both of those are extremely subjective and without understanding we may inaccurately label someone, more importantly, we may inaccurately label ourselves. If you go back and read that first paragraph you might realize that no context for any of the things I confessed to was given. This is a reflection of how we often view the world. We can walk outside and see someone on the ground pummeling a random person to the point of near death and immediately want to save the person being assaulted. We immediately think that fighting and damn near killing someone is wrong so the person doing that act is a bad person. What we do not know is whether the person being assaulted was a rapist and the attacker was protecting or defending a friend of theirs. We don’t know if the person being assaulted was actually a person being attacked by a bully. This is pretty basic and well known logic, but how often do we apply this to ourselves?
I know at times I truly feel like a bad person and that I am not deserving of a lot of good things. Be it love, happiness, or even just peace of mind. I sometimes get in ruts where I think about how I did people wrong, or how society would view the situations I am in and deem me the bad guy. This isn’t a pity party, this is just transparency. I am not happy all the time. I succumb to the beliefs that I am just bad. What I am working on is applying understanding to my own situations and letting that take precedence over how I might be viewed. I ask you, how often do you beat yourself up if you fail at something even though you know you tried your best? How often do you question how good of a person you are because you hurt someone really badly? How often do you compromise, by not really compromising, and just apologize and place the onus of fixing a strained situation on yourself under the guise of being the bigger person simply because the other party wont treat you how you know you should be treated? It might happen a lot. You might be being a harsher critic on yourself than you need to be because you are focused on whether or not you were right or wrong in a situation that is bothering you. What I have been doing lately to counter this is seeking understanding as a means of determining just what is good and bad. I am learning that if I make a decision that is to ultimately protect my mental health and my peace of mind then it is good for me. If I am making a decision that is not in the benefit of my mental or my peace and it seems to harm another person then it is bad. With this process I started to realize that me not talking to my mother or me seeming to hurt people who love me are not things that make me a bad person. To someone who does not understand my reasoning I may be deplorable. To someone who cares more about the relationship one has with someone more than the thing that strained the relationship I may be a horrible person. To me, with my understanding, I know that I am doing what is “good” as I understand the context of my actions. I hope anyone reading this can understand that as well.
