I'm A Villain Too...

When we’re young, we’re told that superheroes and villains only exist in fairytales. We read stories like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood and we think, "the villain is evil, the villain is bad."

But… I’m a villain too.

Now, I don’t mean I go around stealing candy from little kids or lighting people’s hair on fire on purpose.

But I do mean, in the hundreds of people I’ve encountered in my life, somewhere along the way, while they were in the middle of their story… I was the bad guy, I was the evil witch, I was the villain.

Somewhere along the way, I woke up one morning, ran into someone and made them spill coffee on themselves, I looked at them the wrong way and they felt insecure, I excluded someone, I didn’t smile when someone needed it most.

Somewhere along the way, I was not the superhero… and for everyone, I never can be.

See, If you put thirty people in a line, and individually ask them about one person, I guarantee there would be different answers.

To some, a person is amazing. They walk into people’s lives, impact them in ways unimaginable, and that’s that.

But for others, for no reason at all, or for every reason, that same exact person is considered the villain in their fairytale.

It got me thinking, as people, as people who go throughout life making connections and interactions that have an impact on other people’s livelihood, how do we balance out being the superhero and being the villain?

How do we come across so inspirational to some people, and as a complete asshole to others?

Somewhere along the way, someone looked at me and decided to not like me, not want to think of me as good, and cast me out as being their friend.

I’ve done the same.

And maybe that simple fact right there, that we label people in our lives as villains for our own personal reasons, and then tell other people that same idea, makes us all villains in our own right.

But even villains have souls.

Even villains crave redemption, acceptance, belonging, and love.

Maybe if we stopped to think about why people are the way they are, we wouldn’t label people as villains or superheroes. We’d just look at everyone as someone going through a journey.

I acknowledge my role in everyone’s fairytale isn’t great, but it’s a role.

I acknowledge that somewhere along the way I’ll look at my own villains and demons and they won’t always be other people, they will be me.

I will have been the cause of my own destruction at one point or another, I will have been my own toxic waste, I will have been the wicked witch, with a perfectly manicured princess staring back at me in the mirror.

I won’t always want to see it, but somewhere in this journey called life, I was the bad guy.

Does that mean I always will be, maybe not?

But I fully acknowledge…

I am a villain too… and so are you.