On permission to not be a good person

Being a whole person is less stressful :: ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON SEPTEMBER 2nd 2022

One of the best thing I’ve ever done for myself is to stop trying to live up to the standard of being a good person, or a good woman.

To be honest? I don’t know if I am a good person.

But I sure as fuck don’t want people to expect me to be. I mean that in all contexts, I don’t want my clients or my students to expect that from me, I don’t want my family or my friends to expect that from me, I don’t want my lovers or my partners to expect that from me.

I will absolutely crush your dreams and expectations of me if you expect me to be a hero or a good person.

This is because I am a whole person.

Here’s why - I mean technically everything leads back to my autistic way of processing things - but here is my process:

Being a good person is exhausting. You can never make mistakes. You have to be punished when you make mistakes - by yourself or by others - in really cruel ways. You have to know everything. You have to perform even when you are not feeling well. You have to be selfless but not too much that people will think you’re pathetic, and then you have to be just selfish enough so that you can take care of yourself enough to be able to serve others. What a complex set of rules and things that do not make sense to me.

So here’s how I made it simple: I am simply a person. I have been put on this earth through science and maybe also magic and I will leave this earth through science and maybe also magic.

What I do with my time here is up to me, and I do not wish to be obeying the patriarchy during that time. I do not wish to give up my humanness, my dreams, my time, my opinions and my desire during that time to a system that wants to objectify me and has tricked me into thinking it was my own idea to become a 2-dimensional figure so that I could be given worth and acceptance.

No judgement if that’s what you want to do with your time - I believe in free will and consent like really hugely. However, it is not in my consent to be this shiny thing that has no cracks in public.

I don’t want to be a good girl.

I don’t want to be a good person.

NAH, I wanna be a whole human. Loud, messy and quiet and tidy all at once. I cannot do that if I am a good person. I cannot write a memoir(s) if I am a good person. I can only do that if I am a whole person. I cannot write this newsletter if I am a good person; only a whole one. I cannot do my work if I am so focused on being a good person that I forgo truth and interest.

A friend to all is a friend to none, as the hit Taylor Swift song “Cardigan” states.

Sometimes, I will have days and weeks and years where I am truly a stellar person. I have enough capacity, I’ve been sleeping well, I have a filled up belly, I have patience oozing from me, I am in my vulnerability, I do as I say I will because I am not sick or burnt out, I will make you laugh so much you’ll feel relaxed in your body, I have things that are bringing me joy, people are reflecting me back to me in ways that make me feel confident and hot, no one has pissed me off in a major way in a while… you know, I’m good… I’m available.

There will be other times in which I am a pretty shit person. My brother will have done something that shocked me and left me having to recover. I will overpromise and disappoint people and they will tell me they don’t trust me. I will be sick and grumpy, demanding & filled with tears. I will be harsh and mean instead of being vulnerable, as a way to protect myself and I will hurt people. I will be autistic and not understand vague information/ boundaries/ thoughts and feel panicked and confused in my body when I feel something but it is not said literally, which will make people triggered. I will not be honest about what I actually feel because I am scared to be abandoned or rejected or gaslit, so I will mask and deny intimacy and connection.

There will be times where I will be wrong - like plain out wrong. I will be triggered and I will be defensive and I will make conclusions that weren’t/ aren’t true. I will have to sit with myself, and then apologize or have someone help me see a blind spot.

There will be times in which I will see people more than they have ever been seen. There are times where my self-awareness and deep awareness of life and psychology will feel like a balm. There are times where it will feel annoying and invasive. I’ve made really good decisions from healthy parts of me, and I have made poor decisions that were from unhealthy parts of me. All parts of me make sense even though the unhealthy parts are lacking in resource and integration and I have to pay attention to them.

I am a whole person. Not a good person.

I had someone in my life who read pieces of my book before it got published and they said, “I know you don’t want to be a good person in the moral sense, but this book is good for the soil, good for the planet.”

Sometimes, yes, an excellent, sublime, interesting and truly good person, but please please don’t expect me to be like this all the time. Of course, I care about not harming people and if I am and I can change it, I will. But sometimes, I am going to be a bad person. I am going to hurt people - never on purpose (notice I am not saying I am a dangerous person), but because I am a human. I am going to be a disappointment, perhaps even a shock, an uncomfortable something.

And guess what? I would rather be a whole human than a good human any day of the week.

I can relax here.

I would rather have people around me who are whole humans too, because good humans are fragile actually, the connection with them can be futile or elusive, they break easier, they have more defences, less understanding of nuances. They don’t know they are worthy and valuable outside of being good too.

And they are. We all are.