"Bad Person Points"

This was an essay but then it was suddenly a different essay/half journal, and I decided to edit it pretty little and let it go – I hope it’s interesting. I wrote it in the evening, curled up under the little entry light on my tiny patio, on one of the first beautiful weather days of the year, as the sun disappeared around me. Thinking about being gentler with myself, accidentally learning how to be even more gentle with myself.

“Well, that’ll just be my bad person points.”

I will not always act in line with my own values. It feels important to me to acknowledge that, both so that I can be gentler with myself, and so that I don’t as easily feel the need to convince myself that something is exactly in line with my values when it isn’t. If I only allow myself to believe I am a good person if I am always acting with the most integrity I can imagine, I will always disappoint myself, and likely I will disappoint other people too. I don’t always have to justify my own behavior; sometimes I just need to say “this one I’m not justifying – I have no reason this is ultimately acceptable, or maybe I do, but this isn’t making or breaking who I am.”

So sometimes, to remind myself of this, I just say “Well, that will just be my bad person points for the week.”

I think the last time I mentioned this to my partner, they thought it was harsh towards myself to call it that, and probably it is – I guess I could phrase it some other way. I think though that at the moment that’s the point. If I can accept that I am a bad person just a little, I can believe I’m a good person overall. Nothing minor is going to shatter that.

This is mostly for things that are truly very small – like “I don’t want to clean this thing to recycle it, so it’s going in the trash” or “I’m going to buy something I don’t need from Amazon instead of a local store.” I value being conscientious with waste and supporting people I feel good about. My perfect, ideal self always finds a way. My real, human self can just not overthink spending $30 or throwing away an oily tin sometimes.

Is this really just a way to get around my OCD? Actually, it might be.

I imagined reading that like I hadn’t just written it, and I think I’d tell that person that they don’t need to care that much about decisions on that scale. Unfortunately, I do! And I know a lot of people who also do—the line between “high standards” and “dysfunctional” can be pretty thin or just very confusing, so, here we are.

I don’t always do what perfect me would do. But no one in the history of the species has been 100% consistent with their behavior or skills or anything else.

I spent a lot of time trying to prove that I was at least striving to be perfect, but I think the problem with striving for perfection is that it is a fundamental lack of trust. If I trust myself to achieve what is realistic for me, why do I need to reach higher? Strain myself? Keep the bar out of reach forever?

If I trust myself, why do I need to convince myself all the time that I’m working on removing all of my flaws?

I’ve done over a decade of therapy, because I did not trust myself to even understand how to exist in society; I didn’t understand what felt fundamentally off about every moment I was awake, or why I didn’t fit in very well with anyone, or why my brain was always spinning in circles.

I write so much because I mostly only think in words when I’m writing or speaking. It gives me a huge literal headache to force the inside thoughts into the shapes of words and sentences.

I think so much because I spent SO much time trying to understand why everything was so boring and so tense and why I was never going to be enough just existing, why I wouldn’t be allowed to live if I wasn’t proving that I would be perfect if I could. I think so much because I need to understand why people mistreat each other, because I need to understand what people think of me, and why, and why I think what I think about them, and all the ways I could prove I’d be perfect if I could so that people won’t be mean to me.

And I mostly don’t believe that, out loud, anymore, but part of me does. That part of me is just running that worry over and over in the background all the time, even though I know all the people in my life now do not care at all if I would be perfect if I could be. They don’t want or need that from me. I don’t want or need that from them. We don’t need each other to be some way to prove something about ourselves and that’s the only reason anyone asked that of me in the first place–it was about them. When I’ve been angry at people for not being who I want them to be, that was about myself too.

I think that’s what messed me up so much when I spent all my time online, with people who did want everyone socializing with them to prove they’d be perfect if they could. I think most of those people probably have pretty similar traumas, ultimately interpersonal traumas, where others have taught them that proving “I’d be perfect if I could” is the way to be. It’s why that attitude feels so evangelical – because that’s the value system, at least from what I’ve heard—you know, “you’ve already failed but you try to be perfect anyway for some reason.”

That’s definitely what hurt me about it. I’ve written down and published that thought before, actually; I wrote that in 2017, and then I dropped my blog for five years because the existential crisis of “Oh my god every way I’ve been to like a thousand people was just OCD” really snapped me out of wanting to tell anyone what I thought about anything.

What’s funny is that it got more views and likes than any essay I’ve ever written. I didn’t notice until I went back to write again, years later.

I think a lot of people online are getting sucked into what are ultimately OCD-adjacent ways of thinking.

Did you know morality OCD is a specific sub-type?

“OCD loves to pick on the areas of an OCD sufferer’s life that they value most, such as doing well by others. If being a “good” person wasn’t so important to the individual, perhaps the uncertainty of it would not be so disturbing to them.” I have been shouting this at people for over a decade. Like, individual people in my life who’ve been tormented asking themselves if they’re a bad person over and over.

I thought I wasn’t in that boat, grateful that I haven’t ever really wondered if I’m a bad person; the above sentiment has always seemed very obviously true to me. But a more insidious version of the exact same thing is the sense that I am good, but that I could theoretically become so inconsistent as to make my values meaningless. That is, ultimately, a roundabout way of wondering if I am a good person—if my values are meaningless, how could I or anyone else think I’m good? I am always able to fall from goodness.

I know why I feel that! It’s, like a lot of things, what I learned from my childhood, and that used to make me feel silly, but that’s how we learned to be people! We’re gonna do those things until we learn something else, either intentionally or passively.

This part of my OCD is probably actually about achievement. Achievement is all my dad cared about – that is what made me “good.” The pursuit of perfection being the goal was a clever, and awful, way to keep me from accepting myself. Perfection isn’t possible, but the pursuit of it could go on indefinitely.

He “didn’t care” if I got perfect grades, only that I was doing my best. But I was smart, so my best must be perfect grades (coincidentally). I did get almost perfect grades. I always got B’s in math – and that was the way he proved he “didn’t care about perfection” – because it was okay to get B’s in math; I just wasn’t that good at math.

They skipped me 2 grades in math. I finished calculus in 11^th grade and didn’t take math my senior year because there was no more math to teach a highschooler past non-math-major college math. B’s. Bad at math.

So that’s where I come from. And, long story, but I did learn eventually that him caring about me was contingent on achievement, or at least he was willing to pull care away to try and trick me into not being disabled and continuing to “achieve.” So that sad little sense I’d always had was ultimately right. Which made me feel both devastated and more forgiving toward myself for how hard I had tried.

Now, I have that part of the OCD. Which cares more about my values. I value being a good person more than being great at things. I’m not free of that – I am still unreasonably embarrassed to even just literally be new at anything, but that doesn’t dig into my most intense emotions and fears. My fears about abandonment and loss of self are no longer about achieving, as again, no one in my adult life could possibly need that from me. People in my life do need me to follow my own values though.

Or do they?

Do they?

Huh.

Maybe—they don’t. Not like that. Maybe they just want me to be kind to them, and to be only reasonably sorry when I haven’t been as kind as I want to be. Maybe no healthy adult is going to try and hurt me into being who they want me to be. Maybe I know the people in my life and we trust each other.

Maybe I actually don’t need to care if people have the hobby I gave up a long time ago where we try and convince people they aren’t living up to their values. That one only works if you think you need to be perfect, and you’re used to being bullied into staying where people want you to be.

I have tried to hop around this OCD in the way of going “I can identify myself as a kind, conscientious person, knowing I am sometimes unkind and unconscientious.” That’s maybe supposed to not need to be followed up with examples. Hanging onto the amount of unkind and unconscientious I can be before I lose myself.

I’m too old for this…

Not that it’s immature to feel these ways. I just, as I said, spent 13 years in therapy, and I did that to try and make myself slowly into a person who felt comfortable living.

In my early thirties now, I am at the end of “I’m very young.” And that’s another essay – I am very young, by the way. This is the last time I can jump with most of my life ahead of me, and I think I need to be okay with fucking up.

I legitimately started this completely unaware that this was still OCD. I’m glad I figured it out though. If you’d ever like to shake me and go “that’s still OCD” at any time, by the way, please go ahead.

Thanks for being here – it’s healing to have people to write for. I don’t write in this particular way much anymore, but I’m glad I got to. If you saw yourself in this, I hope it helped in some way. <3