The Evil in Me: Confessions of a “Good” Girl

a fun little thought experiment

Hello Friend,

Sleepless nights and vivid dreams were my bedpartners last month and as most toxic partners do, it did me more harm than good. I’ve been getting a lot of content pushing me to deconstruct the demon caricature pushed on by media (see: red horns, pointy tail, pitchforks and a goatie). It’s been challenging me to instead look into the darkness that already lives inside of me.

As a fan of introspection, I did a little exploring. Inside my soul I found a dark mass nesting and festering like fungi. It is a distinctly uncomfortable experience to look within the shadows of your mind only to find your reflection smiling back.

A truly good person acknowledges the evil that exists in them and knows when it needs to be unleashed.

I heard a version of this while I was doom scrolling on my commute home and it made me think of all the ways that I was taught about good and evil, specifically how much I enjoyed the validation of being deemed the good girl.

I used to wear my good girl title like a badge of honour. Perfection was the trait I built my entire personality on. I had to be pristine. I was taught that if I followed the rules set out for me, good grades, good words, good deeds, I would be repaid in the same kindness by the world.

It turns out good grades don’t translate to being kind or finding genuine connection. Good words, if a lie in its core, causes more destruction in the long run. And good deeds, when executed within the context of transaction, results in varying forms of resentment.

When I was younger my mom used to tell me, don’t expect yourself from other people. It always made me question the fairness of that. If I was doing X for person A shouldn’t they be reciprocating X with me. It took me a while to realize humans are not programs that trigger each other in a predictable pattern. My mother was just warning me about the likelihood of disappointment if I continued on expecting people to read my mind.

Of course, I didn’t listen. Young people very rarely do.

I just did what I could to be considered a “good” girl. I gave people my time even if it meant I had none for myself. I let people make fun of me and laughed alongside them even if they were being cruel. And I gave people anything they asked for in hopes that an equivalent exchange would occur.

Society has always been very good at making you feel like minimizing yourself is a good thing. If you don’t challenge the status quo you will be rewarded with acceptance. But there’s an insidious underbelly with this acceptance. It comes with an invisible condition that you agree, from here on out, to know your place and never move away from it.

Like all reformed good girls it was devastating when I realized the system that promised to protect me was in fact what was compromising me. Burning the ties between myself and societal expectations felt like shattering betrayal. From those ashes rose the call for true liberation and unconditional love for myself, the likes of which I have never experienced before.

I was free.

Free to decide who I am and who I wanted to be. Free to be both soft and sharp as needed. I could now morph depending on the situation I would find myself in.

I’m still learning to find the balance of when to access my light and darkness. Admittedly, I’m not perfect at it but in this walk towards becoming a more healed version of myself, perfection is taking a lower rank in my list of priorities. I don’t know if I will ever be able to shake the needling voice that demands perfection out of me but I am slowly learning that perfection is not synonymous to good.

To finding the good (and evil) in you,

Dhan xx