V FOR? TAKE A GUESS.

Everyone enjoys a villain. Villains are portrayed as the bad guys, the psychopaths, the sociopaths, the pathological liars, every possible bad character describing word with path in it. When watching a film, people enjoy watching the bad guys more than the heroes. When reading books, people love the villains. However, while most people love looking at life from the villains’ perspective they actually do hate them. I know, the statement itself is paradoxical. Most people are disturbed by the vile nature of villains, by how they are fueled by their selfishness, by how they simply make their choices. Most people love heroes because they are in denial and they do not want to view themselves as the villains that they are.

I am a villain. I am not a good person and I do not like to be viewed as that. I may have some ounce of goodness in me, but I am not a good person. You probably are not. I am not saying that the world is full of bad people traipsing as saints but I do not believe that people can be 1000% good. Even Jesus Himself, the son of God, was not 1000% a saint but that is a story for another day.

My definition of a villain may vary quite a lot from yours. You may define a villain as a wicked, vile, evil scoundrel or person and I would not blame you, because that is how villains are portrayed. However, I look at villains as just humans who have accepted the fact that to be human is to have weaknesses. To be human is to be broken. To be human is to be able to make choices based on the circumstances around you as a human. Sure, maybe the villain in your life did take this to a higher or more extreme level, but more often we misunderstand them. Maybe if we were put in the very same circumstances, we would actually do the same thing or even worse. Maybe we are the actual villains for being so harsh on persons seeking ways to express the hurt, the brokenness and the loss.

We, as humans, love idealism. We love imagining of a perfect world where it is all rainbows and sunshine. An ideal world full of forgiveness, full of love, full of kindness, full of patience, full of everything good. Ideal is near impossible to attain and we do live in a real world. The sad part is, when a child consistently lies to get out of trouble with maybe the parent or teachers who beat him up for every single little thing, they are called a pathological liar. When a person has been hurt or broken by events so much that they start seeking ways to relieve the pain, they are classified as psychopaths with psychopathic behaviors. When society or life has absolutely messed up with someone’s mind that they decide they won’t conform to the box that society wants them to be in, they are called a sociopath. I would delve into more, but that is not why I am here.

I am not here to defend or justify someone being bad or doing bad things to hurt other people. That is upon the person and their god, whoever they pray to. I will not say that it is okay for someone to be gallivanting the world doing all sorts of things, but I would call for more than the usual seclusion and harsh judgment imposed on said persons. Not a single soul on this earth is a saint. We all handle hurt, pain, loss, brokenness, sickness in different ways. Sure being a villain may not seem right to you, but maybe more understanding as to why they are the way they are and why they do the things they do would go a longer way.

We are all humans, let us just be a bit kinder to one another. The world is dark and harsh, but if you were to view it from my point of view, our perspectives would not be the same.

With all it sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it still is a beautiful world – From the Desiderata by Max Ehrmann.