Alright, Let's Do This One Last Time
It took a long time to figure this out, but better late than never
The winter of my 29th year, I clutched my buy one get one free duo of sushi in one hand, cell phone in the other as I walked back to my car, the jet black panels reflecting the soft glow of red neon lights. I’ve never been deeper in the red, and the lights reflected it, and yet it felt like the neon became a blanket instead of a treacherous reminder. A year and eight months ago I introduced myself to Substack as “not a good person.” I wasn’t a bad person, but I couldn’t being myself to believe that I met all of my own self-inflicted standards to be a “Good Person.”
I realized, mere weeks before my 30th birthday as I unlocked the driver side door, that I am a good person.
I really fucking am!
And I’m not gonna sit here and write out to you all the deeds I’ve done to prove I’ve earned the title because that is not how it works, and I get that now. I am a good person. You don’t have to complete a list of good deeds to be a good person it just . . . is. As within, so without.
Having poor mental health has no bearing upon my goodness. Being petty or mopey or angry or hurt does not detract from my goodness. Having a long streak of bad luck does not undermine my goodness. I am a good person.
Goodness is like a scale, like Anubis’ scale to measure your soul. Or a meter— like a thermometer, with a mercury level or whatever— and I do firmly believe that after a certain amount of bad things you can’t really call yourself a good person. But . . . in no way shape or form have I ever done anything so horrendous as to tip the scale of my heart and soul down badly enough to not be a good person. Like, I’ve finally gained some perspective on the eve of my second decade of adulthood and thank god because literally it’s not been that bad.
You know what a good person does? Gives themself grace. Tries. Just fucking tries their best, knowing that their “best” can change depending upon day, and moon cycle, and retrograded planet. Does their best to do as little harm as possible. That’s it! All that other shit is extra, and it’s great to do, but I see now that putting such a high and strict definition for being “good” was just me hating myself in a different way— which, I gotta say, I am fucking creative if nothing else.
And maybe you’re reading this, right, and you’re thinking I’m being kind of cringe right now. Which, first of all, people with good self-image should check their privilege— okay, I kid I kid. But I mean . . . this is such a huge self realization for me. This is not just a realization, but the breaking of a seven year cycle for me.
You know when I stopped thinking of myself as a good person? When I graduated college and I couldn’t get a better job than the lifeguard position I had at the time. And I was a lifeguard at Volcano Bay, mind you, so I couldn’t even get a better position at the company I was already at. I couldn’t get even an entry level position at any corporate place . . . and months went on like this, not getting any acknowledgment from the career rat race as it slowly dawned on me that I was not a strong contender in this fight for work. And that . . . made me feel like I wasn’t good enough. It chipped away at my self-esteem, my confidence. Years go no and I go from that bad job to a surprisingly worse one at a restaurant at the company and wow, food service at the mid-tier level is horrendous. Especially when COVID hit.
And all the while, the negativity grew inside of me. I was scrambling, scratching at the doors all locked to keep me from getting out of my bad situation. I was frantic, desparate, this wasn’t at all what I had envisioned for myself at that point in life. It wasn’t what I wanted. I couldn’t find anyone to help me find a better path, my own attempts to find better had landed me in worse, and I felt like I couldn’t even trust myself. My decision. My own mind. Of course I thought I wasn’t a good person at that time, so many times I wondered if I was just a poor, worthless heap of meat. Can you imagine feeling like that for so very, very long? Years! And year there were short breaks— literally just a handful of days in those seven years— where I felt, not good, but relieved that the whirlpool of hatred was slowing down inside of me. I felt like I might never escape that unending tide of vileness.
Well . . . I did get out of it. Took about three to four years of whittling away at it, but now here I am. This world feels so different after so long of feeling like my skin was burning. My eyes relax from the squint of pain, my shoulders roll back from my ears, and I’m starting to roll out the pain from my lower back where all the tension had become an iron ball at the small of it. And. Wow. I’m a good person.
Of course I am! How could I have not seen that I was when I’ve been trying so hard to do good as much as I can? I never stopped trying, not even at my lowest, I kept scratching and clawing and feeling around for an area of give so that I could scramble through it and on to a better thing. I wouldn’t have done all that if I didn’t think I deserved it . . . if I hadn’t known, even at the most basic level that I was a good person who deserved better.
And that. That’s really the thing there. I am a good person who deserves better. Fuck that capitalized Good Person shit I was peddling when I first got on here, Good People are off putting and I’m not even sure if they’re real . . . like the Jersey Devil, or North Dakota.
I want to just shout out good people here. People who try to be good children to very complicated parents. People who have very few dollars but can’t help the tug in their chest that compels them to give one of those very few dollars to the one who truly needs it more than them. People who drink and cuss and laugh too loud in social situations, but then come home quiet as church mice to not disturb the neighbors, tidies up the mess in their room or maybe just drops down atop the discarded clothes and texts to their friends to make sure they got home safe. People who find it hard to talk about a lot of things, but do their best to make up for that by being a physical presence in the lives of their friends who are going through a rough time as well. People who are grieving but get up every day, starch and iron their faces, and set the weight of the world on their shoulders again because they don’t want to offload it to someone else and burden them. People who don’t think they have very much to offer but gladly give of what they do have, earnest and afraid of apathy.
Have you always felt this quiet warmth like what I feel now?