I Used To Be a Bad Person

I thought I was a good person. Turns out I wasn’t. I thought I stood for the right values, but my actions never seemed to dictate that. I thought I stood for love. Turns out I was full of hate and didn’t even know why. I was manipulative without having to think about it; somehow it came naturally to me. I was a bad person and didn’t know how.

What does a bad person look like? Could you spot one if you had to? Are they bad all the time, or only behind closed doors? And maybe the most pressing question of all: do bad people know they’re bad?

I was 17 and had never done anything to truly disappoint my parents. I was raised by two strict, traditional, immigrant parents who did their best to instill the right values in me. I was a good student and a great athlete throughout my childhood and through high school. I never smoked, drank, partied, or hung out with idiots. I was living the “right” way, as far as I knew.

I spent most of high school pretty much isolated. I didn’t have any friends, romantic relationships, or any social life at all up until my junior year. That’s when I entered my first real relationship, you want to call it that. All throughout high school I told myself that whichever girl chose to be with me would be the luckiest girl in the world because I was going to be the guy to treat her the way she deserves to be treated. I would encourage her, make her let go of her insecurities and help her realize the beautiful person she was. Without having ever been in a relationship, I was convinced I would be the best partner to the girl who decided to give me a chance.

Fast forward about 9 months later and we had broken up and gotten back together probably 20 times. We fought every single day and the relationship was as toxic as it could be, without any physical abuse. I was controlling, manipulative, angry, and just flat out mean. I was an asshole. I reduced her social circle to me, and only me. I drove her away from her friends without realizing that’s what I was doing. I didn’t let her go to parties or hang out with guys in any fashion. I tried to turn her into me. I subconsciously reinforced her behaviors that fit my idea of what it meant to be a good person and a good girlfriend, and I punished her for behaviors that sought to foster individuality.

You have no idea what it is like to go about life thinking you’re a good person, only to be smacked in the face by reality and confronted with the harsh truth that you are everything you did not want to be. I mirrored the behavior of people I promised myself I would never be like. I stripped another person’s autonomy from her and made her feel guilty for simply being herself. You know new research has shown that most people who develop PTSD develop it not because of something they witnessed, but because they committed an act they didn’t know they were capable of conducting. Many soldiers who come home from battle don’t have PTSD because they witnessed a friend die, but because they witnessed themselves kill another human being. Now I definitely don’t have PTSD, but there’s something to be said for the absolute shock I experienced in the discovery of my own capacity for malevolence.

Could Rapunzel have done any wrong locked in her ivory tower? It took me many years and a considerable amount of fuck-ups to learn the fact one can only act ethically if one has the option to act unethically. A person must face the world of potential time and time again, and choose to manifest the positive outcome within that potential before that person considers themselves good.

I thought I was a good person because I had never put myself into the position to do wrong. The human mind is so naive and so flawed that I convinced myself from within the safe walls of my bedroom that I was a good person because I hadn’t necessarily done anything bad. You don’t become a good person by just not doing the wrong thing. That was always easy for me. You just don’t have to do anything wrong and you get a first-class ticket to heaven? Shit, sign me up. So I sat in my room, did my homework, went to practice, and then came home and judged anyone and everyone who ever made a mistake, or what I considered a mistake.

The world was black and white to me. Everyone sucks and I’m okay. I was judging people even though I didn’t have the courage to go out and actually experience potential for myself. When the time finally came and I was asked to step up to the plate, I struck out swinging on three pitches outside of the strike zone, punched the catcher for calling the pitches, and rushed the pitcher for making me look stupid.

Finding out you’re a bad person is not easy. I knew I had anger problems, yet I continued to take it out on her. I took it out on my next girlfriend as well. The urge to act on my impulses was too strong for me to overcome. I made the wrong decision every single time, apologized profusely for it the next morning, said I would never do it again, and then went on to do it again. It was often hard to sleep at night knowing how pathetically I had behaved just a couple hours earlier. I would lay there and think about the thing I said to my girlfriend that I knew would piss her off, that bomb in my arsenal that I knew was off limits, but said anyway for the sake of hurting her.

“I didn’t mean it”, I would tell her. She’d reply “How can I ever believe it when you say something nice about me, considering you hate every single thing about me when we fight?”

I didn’t hate her. I loved her dearly, but I hated myself. The discovery of my own capacity for evil fragmented my idea of reality, of myself, and everything I thought I had known about the world. I was insecure and hateful and just felt cheated. I felt like the world was out to get me, while at the same time I was making life harder for someone else. I was nice to everyone else. I’ve always been a cordial, sweet person to everyone I meet and treat every stranger with the dignity they deserve. It’s the people I loved that I neglected.

As far as everyone knew, I was a great kid. And in reality I really did make the right decisions when everything was going fine. It was when adversity struck that my true side revealed itself. Martin Luther King Jr. said “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” If I was angry there was no stopping me. I didn’t ask for permission, I said what I said and did what I did and asked for forgiveness later. The worse part was I always got it because when everything was going well I was a daisy. I was loving, caring, and giving. When I loved, I loved with everything I had. When I was angry, I hated you with every fiber of my being. Let me tell you right now, that equation does not balance itself out. It ends in way more pain and suffering for every party involved than you could even imagine. I could never be depended on, and the possibility of my being able to flip a switch at any moment, or just get up and leave, leaves the other person chronically debilitated by fear and anxiety.

It’s easy to do no wrong when you avoid situations that put you in a position to choose between right and wrong. I remember my senior year of hs telling my girlfriend that she should be grateful to have a guy that was loyal to her and didn’t cheat on her. I’ll never forget what she said next because I would come to learn the hard way that she was right. She told me “I don’t want the guy who never goes out because he’s afraid he’ll cheat on me. I want the guy who can be surrounded by beautiful women and still choose me every single time.” That didn’t sink in until a couple months later when I went on an official recruiting visit to JMU and kissed a random girl at a party, while still dating my girlfriend. I have a guilty conscience so I woke up the next morning and told her about it immediately. Our relationship took a hit for a while there and I knew I was wrong. I did learn a really valuable lesson through that experience and it helped me grow as a man. I have been loyal to that same girl ever since.

I’m not afraid to admit my wrongdoings because I’ve either addressed them or am in the process of working to correct them every day. I have done my wrongs and I have paid the price for them. It’s not hard to write about these things today because I don’t even recognize the person I’m writing about. He’s not a stranger, because it would be naive of me to think he’s dead buried. He’s more like a friend I used to know, someone I knew I shouldn’t have been involved with. It’s cool to talk about him because he’s no longer around, but If I ever decided to give him a call he’d be happy to come back around and tell me everything he thinks I want to hear. The thing is I don’t want his opinion any more, I want the truth. The people around me tell me the truth, even when it’s not something I want to hear at the moment.

I’m not proud of the person I was, but I’m incredibly proud of the person I am becoming. I chose to air out all my dirty laundry for the sake of transparency, genuineness, and because I feel there are so many valuable lessons to be learned in my failures, and no failure should ever go in vain.

In summary, I learned that being a good person means stepping into the endless options of potential and manifesting the positive outcome despite the luring appeal of temptation.

I also learned that we people tend to think we would act more ethically than we lead ourselves to believe in our imagination. Don’t take it from me, take it from the absurd number of people identified as informers in Nazi, Germany. If you’re a science nerd, take it from Milton’s famous shock experiment where 65% of participants thought they were administering enough shock to someone on the other side of a wall just because a man in lab coat told them to do it. You’re not as good as you think you are; to assume otherwise is to set yourself up for failure. Trust me, I lived it.

The most important lesson I learned is that having a “shadow” as Jung called it, doesn’t make you a bad person. In simpler terms, anger and aggression aren’t bad emotions. Being prone to addiction and even possessing a disagreeable personality don’t necessarily make you a bad person either. Nothing is innately good or bad, it’s how these personality traits or characteristics are utilized and manifested that determines their morality. Learn to harness every tool you have been given to do good. Everyone had everything they need to be a good person. Don’t look anywhere but inside for the answers, they’re right there.