Evil

Movies and books love to paint evil as some permanently scarred, malicious soul out to get everyone, making bad choices with the sole intention to hurt, to burn down the world around it. That’s the picture our mind conjures the moment we hear the word evil.

In reality, evil is just regular people making selfish, insensitive choices. Choices that hurt the people around them, not because they meant to, but because self preservation came first and they looked away from the carnage it left behind. That is the evil we actually live with, day after day. That is you. That is me.

We can rationalize our choices to ourselves all we want, but somewhere in someone else’s world, we were the force that caused them pain.

It was so good to hear that voice again. Catching up, learning what someone I’d lost touch with had been up to all this time, felt like slipping back into an old, familiar warmth. An hour slipped by before I even noticed. My heart melted, just reminiscing.

Memories fade, but what stays behind are the strongest moments, the ones that end up drawing the borders of what we remember. And somehow, I only remember the good things. God, am I glad that’s how I remember them.

Long after the call ended, my mind kept turning over the same question: why did I do what I did. And then it came back to me, everything I did was self preservation. The constant internal conflict, that unsettling feeling of watching my own moral compass erode, becoming someone I didn’t recognize. I remember how it chipped away at my identity, and self respect. How it all came down to a single, quiet fear, that I’d never be able to carry the weight of the past while trying to walk into the future. And I remember how light I felt and at peace, the moment I finally cut the cord that held us together.

From someone else’s side of the story, this might look heart wrenching. It might look like pure evil. I understand that. For me, it was self preservation, a selfish choice that helped me find my center again. And even though it was so, so good to talk and catch up, I know exactly which path I don’t want to walk down again.

That said, I’m grateful we talked for as long as we did last evening. It felt like half my health issues just melted away since then. ♥️