A Portrait of a Villain as a Middle School Boy
One time when I was 12, I was being evil. There was this boy in my cabin at summer camp who had committed the sin of being more popular and nice and good than I was, and so I jealously set out to destroy him. This was long before any kind of personal growth had gotten in the way of my plans for world domination. I tried to get my friends to dislike him and I believe I spread lies. This was ultimately a failed effort. People found out I had been playing the villain, and they rightly were horrified. They cast me out. I was an exile. Everyone hated me. Except Bill.
Bill was the one person who came up to me and said he didn’t judge me and hoped we could still be friends. He was my last refuge. I was incredibly grateful to Bill. That day, all the kids were on the soccer field playing games, and my other friends—who hated me—were sitting on a hill glaring at me in judgment as I played frisbee with Bill. At one point, I glared back at them defiantly, see, you haven’t taken everything from me, I still have one friend!! Without taking my eyes off of them, I tossed the frisbee over to Bill. I was never good at throwing any objects where they were intended to go, but this one time, in defiance of all the laws of nature, this frisbee flew perfectly towards Bill without me even looking at him.
Unfortunately, Bill was also not looking at me. He had not expected me to throw anything while I was in a glaring-contest with the other kids. That made sense. It was why Bill did not catch the frisbee, nor did he even know it was coming when it crashed into his nose. Blood went everywhere. Tears. Destruction. I, already the villain, had just crushed my last friend, and all my jury had witnessed it.
We don’t live in the jungle anymore, but we still have the nervous systems which were designed to help us escape from death by predators. Today, those nervous systems are attuned to our daily lives, and being cast out of the social fabric, being perceived as a threat to everyone good in the world, this was—to my nervous system—the equivalent of being eaten by a tiger.
20 years later, after turning over a new leaf and apologizing to all those people and trying to be a better person, that memory still brings up so much shame. I can still feel the tiger’s fangs in my heart. Shame and guilt are such difficult emotions to let go of because a part of me still believes that I deserve them. After all, I earned them, didn’t I? So letting go of them would be like escaping prison. Nice, but illegal! A part of my heart is committed to holding onto this punishment forever.
As someone who really loves to look for the upside to any situation, these situations are the most difficult to do that with. What silver lining can come from a moment where you hurt other people? And if you do find that silver lining, are you just letting yourself off the hook for something that you are supposed to suffer for?
The other day, an elementary school student of mine knocked another kid to the floor and the kid hurt his head. It was a semi-accident. The shove was intentional, but the pain and the tears were unexpected. Even after the one who fell had forgiven the transgressor, my student couldn’t speak. He was frozen with guilt and shame. I could see the tiger’s fangs in his heart as he whispered an apology and looked down at the ground. I put my hand on his shoulder and said, “I’m really proud of you for apologizing, and I know it doesn’t make your feelings go away right away. But we all make mistakes.” These platitudes went nowhere. So I said, “One time, I accidentally threw a frisbee into my friend’s face and broke his nose and his face exploded with blood.”
My student's eyes went wide. “You did WHAT!?” And then the whole thing turned into a circle where we all talked about times we hurt people and came to regret it.
Any experience can be turned into a positive if you do the requisite mental backflips. But experiences where you are the perpetrator are probably the hardest for me. But I want to offer this. For any experience, including these ones, there is at least one major benefit no one can take away: you can now be there to help the next person you meet who goes through the same thing. This is true for any difficult experience, but I use this example because it’s particularly difficult for me to find something good in situations where I hurt other people, yet even in them this idea is still true.
In my work with people struggling with addiction, nothing could be more powerful than this. People who carry memories which fill them with shame are now in a situation where those same shameful memories give them the ability to relate and be useful to other people. Watching them transform shame into a tool for connection is an incredibly beautiful thing to watch.
None of this is possible if we don’t have the courage to be vulnerable. The willingness to disclose those things that make us so uncomfortable is what allows us to connect, what allows us to grow, and what allows us to try to make amends. Without it, we’re all just food for the tigers.
I’m sorry,
Harry