Mary B. Sellers reminds we are all complex individuals encompassing both dark and light.
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As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become less of the little girl who saw the world in black and white. The gray started showing, and then, the finer shades became clearer, until what I saw wasn’t a color but this vast thing that held an innumerable amount of lights and darks. Stepping away from it, and backing myself against the wall of a tentative and still developing maturity, I’m still able to see the black and white for what they are, but instead of assurance, which comes along with believing in vague absolutes, it now seems like a hasty substitute for the lazy of mind, and those prone to sweeping generalizations.
We teach and are taught that life is a mostly linear thing (perhaps bent a bit for plot excitement) but straightened out with ease before the final scene.
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I think we owe this partly to the stories we tell our children. They are tidy packages, complete with a beginning, middle, and end. The ends are happy. The ends come when true love is realized, when the guy gets the girl, when there’s a spontaneous sunset entirely perfect for riding into. These stories are simplified, the mere bare bones of what a story could and should be. We teach and are taught that life is a mostly linear thing (perhaps bent a bit for plot excitement) but straightened out with ease before the final scene.
There’s the good guy and the bad guy—so static and one-dimensional that they, when looked at close enough, would pass as caricatures in the real world. The bad guy is only bad. The bad guy has no interests outside of “being and doing evil”. His only motives are ones of crime, murder, and inflicting pain. And the good guy, well, he has all of the physical attributes that are generally accepted as pleasing—the toothy smile, implausible idealism, and heart of gold.
But what if the bad guy was a shade darker than his manic goody-two-shoes foil, but also had a past, had experienced pain, had done something, at one time, that wasn’t bad, but maybe good or kind?
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But what if the bad guy was a shade darker than his manic goody-two-shoes foil, but also had a past, had experienced pain, had done something, at one time, that wasn’t bad, but maybe good or kind? To me, the concept of never doing anything remotely good seems impossible, even if the deed is unintentional. What if he had experienced the complicated mess of love, and that love wasn’t pure, but hard and confusing and addictive? And because of that, he became hard, confused, and addicted to the heady scent of pain? Boom! Bad guy. I’ll end this line of thought before I dig too deeply into the psyche of a fictional character, but do you see what I’m getting at? We say that things are either good or bad and ignore that in-between area that’s the largest and most important part of the concept of morality. We forget that there are shades of dark in all of us; some of these are pulled taught and begin to widen, while some remain just that: a shade, an inkling, a tendency.
I have many shades. I recognize the darker ones, and I try to meet them headfirst with acceptance, but an active acceptance that knows the shades can be altered, and with hard work, made smaller. I think of myself as a “good person,” in the sense that for the most part, I try to be a decent person, looking to the silver linings despite my natural proclivity towards pessimism. While those characteristics are admirable, and generally considered “good,” I can also be selfish, destructive, and cruel when pushed to my limit. I’ve probably committed a good many of the Deadly Sins. My own diagnosis? I’m a medium gray striving for a lighter shade, stumbling along the way.
In a classical vein, I’ve always been highly amused by the Greek and Roman gods. I mean, shit, people, a good many of those guys did some things that in today’s society we deem as “definitely not okay.” Some of them had the ability to turn people who annoyed them into rocks and stuff (not directly from source material but there’s quite a few stories detailing Apollo’s habit of turning lovers into plants …) But besides this: how do you measure “turning someone into an inanimate object” and “she’s a mean person who said X,Y,Z”?
We say that things are either good or bad and ignore that in-between area that’s the largest and most important part of the concept of morality. We forget that there are shades of dark in all of us; some of these are pulled taught and begin to widen, while some remain just that: a shade, an inkling, a tendency.
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Which brings me to my next question: what if there was this person who did something that was deemed bad by most, but who honestly, in their hearts of hearts, believed they were doing the good and right thing? Intention is complicated to define, and it does matter, I realize that, thanks to being the daughter of two lawyers and having a mild case of common sense, but it’s a main source of confusion for me, and something I think worth considering. If the intent is not born from evilness, but does fall into the “evil” category to others, is it evil? How do you measure a paradox like that?
I just posed a lot of really vague questions, so I’ll back up for a minute.
I think evil exists, and I think some of us are more susceptible to it than others. With that being said, even the best of us (excluding all deities, Gandalfs, and Dumbledores) have at times done something either immoral or wrong. So when I hear someone say something like, “well, he/she’s just a bad person,” it confuses me. Because we humans are so exhaustingly complicated, we can’t use such a basic word or term as that to encompass a person’s identity. That’s like saying the sky is blue. It’s not blue, always! Sometimes it’s gray, or even black, and at other times it’s gold and pink when the sun sets, and then other times it’s navy and dotted with stars. It just doesn’t add up, and it fails as a descriptor.
When I hear someone say something like, “well, he/she’s just a bad person,” it confuses me. Because we humans are so exhaustingly complicated, we can’t use such a basic word or term as that to encompass a person’s identity.
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And the entire reason I’m writing about this in the first place is for my own comfort. Sometimes the oddest things can bring you peace. I was made to feel like a bad person recently, and for most of us, that isn’t a pleasant feeling. But then I started examining myself, as well as others, realizing that it was terribly hard to compare one person’s goodness with another. There’s no one-size-fits-all scenario. I know many good people, but I couldn’t possibly rank them in order. And most of these good people have also done some not so great things. But, for me, that doesn’t tip the scale in terms of their worth, because I set up allowances with the ones I love, so there’s a strong insurance they can pull from when they mess up. I think that’s kind of how most people are in terms of their close relationships. We forgive, we recognize that familiar darkness we see in others, we acknowledge our own, and we also acknowledge the lighter shades that made us love them in the first place. Unfortunately, sometimes there’s a mess up that’s too much for the insurance, and that’s when we have to decide on whether we think their lighter shades are worth their dark ones. That’s something we all must do on our own, because objectivity doesn’t exist when it comes to those decisions.
Here’s hoping those lighter shades win in the end, though.
Originally published on RealTalk.
Photo—Nishanth Jois/Flickr