I have spent years of my life believing I am an inherently selfish person. Some of this is my brain playing tricks on me, but I have had people say this to me more than once. The accusation is not unfounded. I know I have done self-centered things. I often choose myself above anybody else. And I feel bad about it over and over again.
Maybe it was my religious upbringing, maybe it was how my parents raised me, but I have always believed that the worst thing a person could be is selfish. Humans are made to be kind to other humans, and the best thing we can do is care for one another. I am haunted at night by the things I’ve done that hurt people, and I spend a lot of time worrying that anything and everything I do will cause harm to others. I fear there is a darkness in me that is all-consuming, and so much of my personal journey in my twenties has been to find ways to evolve into a less self-oriented person. (Or rather, allowing myself to come to terms with the fact that I am less selfish than I once believed.)
In truth, I think that believing I am selfish is a defense mechanism. If I am the problem, then I can fix whatever’s happened. If I go into a situation knowing I am to blame, then that means it is within my power to find the solution to whatever problem we’re having. I see myself as selfish to cover all my bases, to make sure that at the end of the day I am absolutely, definitely not the problem because hey, don’t worry, I already think I’m the worst person here.
As you may have guessed, it’s not a great system.
For a very long time it’s been a tug of war inside my brain, trying to convince myself that I am a Good Person, even as my brain tries to keep score and argue that all these things that I’ve done make me Bad. I’ve had a lot of conversations with my therapist and with my friends, and each of them works very hard to remind me that the things I do aren’t all that bad, and in truth, I do a lot of really selfless things all the time.
But weirdly enough, the thing that has made the most progress in changing my mind, the thing that has started to convince me that maybe I’m better than I thought, is actually fictional characters.
Even though I cannot be unbiased towards my own self, I so often see pieces of me reflected in the characters I consume. I think each of us latches on to specific characters and specific stories because these things act like mirrors. Stories are a safe space to bear witness to our demons and the demons of others, and they give us the opportunity to empathize. We get tricked into feeling compassion for our own selves, even when we might not do so in our own brains. We see ourselves reflected on a screen or on a page, and we’re forced to stand face-to-face with someone who feels just like we do. Often when we study literature in school, we are asked to consider what it’s like to walk around in another man’s shoes, to get a unique perspective from someone who is unlike us, but I’ve found that sometimes the best thing you can do is walk a mile in your own shoes after you’ve spent so long wearing the wrong size.
To me, the most compelling person in any story, is the person who is so dreadfully ashamed of themself that they have a hard time accepting love. More often than not, that character is a man who has done some bad things in his life, made some decisions he isn’t proud of, but at the end of the day he wants to be better. He is drowning in shame, and that shame haunts him so much that he no longer recognizes the good buried within him. But he is good.
There’s a million variations on this archetype, of all genders and ages and walks of life, and ultimately it boils down to this one truth about humanity as a whole: our deepest fear is that we are unlovable because of the wrong we’ve done.
I fear that I am unlovable.
If I could pinpoint where this whole mess started, it would be Wicked. I’m sure you know the story - the Wicked Witch of the West is born green, she’s an outcast in society until she goes to university and is specially chosen to study magic. She has a very peppy roommate who doesn’t like her very much at all, but after a little bit of time, the two learn to love each other and blah blah blah. It was important to me when I was a kid because I had a best friend who was my Galinda. And that right there was the start of the issue at hand.
As an adult, I understand the story of Wicked much better than I did at eleven. I know now that Elphaba is not the villain and that even as they called her wicked, she was one of the few fighting for justice. She’s good at heart even though she’s green and even though everyone claimed she wasn’t. (It’s just bad propaganda, really.) But when my Galinda ditched me because I wasn’t cool enough to be her friend, I internalized the witch hunters. She made me her villain, and in turn, she enlisted me to take up a torch. And I’ve been hunting myself ever since.
I’ve been collecting unlovable characters for years now. Outcasts and lone wolves and criminals and misunderstood men that haunt the narrative over and over again. I empathize with them. I see myself behind their eyes. (Which is quite funny because objectively, some of the worst things I’ve ever done are really just setting boundaries and being a bad communicator.) But in truth, the reason they compel me so much is that, in most of these cases, over the course of a work, you watch these characters Change. They go through an intense emotional evolution, whether by choice or by necessity, and they come out the other side as good, caring men. They hang up their selfishness and trade it for selflessness, and often they are the heroes we need for the story to reach its conclusion.
If you want to know my type, or more importantly, if you want to know who I see when I look in the mirror, here is a brief and incomplete list: Edward Teach (Our Flag Means Death), James “Sawyer” Ford (Lost), Lorcan Salvaterre and Chaol Westfall (Throne of Glass), Loki (MCU), Killian “Captain Hook” Jones (Once Upon a Time)…
I could probably write an essay for each of these men alone to tell you how much they’ve changed my own perception of myself, but if you’ve watched or read any of these works, I’m sure you’ll have an inkling.
What do these men have in common? They’re bad communicators. They look out for themselves because nobody else will. The world sees them as villians, so rather than correct them, they allow everyone else to keep believing the lie. (Sometimes it’s easier to just be the villain.) Each of them in turn feels like a burden to every person they meet, and so they believe they must protect others by keeping them at a safe distance. They are ashamed of who they are, whether that’s because of the things they’ve done or the names they’ve been called.
I’m not here to justify actual bad guys - I know some men really are just evil and irredeemable, and a lot of fictional characters get away with a lot of bad shit. But one of the biggest gifts of humanity is the concept of redemption. Of confession. That you can make bad choices but every day is a new day, and when the sun rises, you can choose to start again. You can always choose to be better. You just have to be brave enough to take that first step.
“I'm afraid...I need to ask the four of you for a favor that will likely be a great imposition. And...There couldn't be worse timing, I understand. But there also couldn't be a greater need. I'm going to be unwell, gentlemen. Quite unwell, I expect. And I don't know for how long. A week? No. Two. Perhaps...Perhaps more. And not only must you draw the tightest possible curtain around what is happening, but you must also care for me... as well, as I will not be able to care for myself.”
— The Terror (2018), 1x5 “First Shot a Winner, Lads”
The only reason these characters resonate so much with me, the reason you can witness their remarkable transformation, is because of the characters and circumstances that surround them. We as humans cannot live without community, and I’d argue we cannot evolve without community either. Without other people around us, we’d have no reason to get better. More than that, we’d have no one there to tell us we are good enough as we are.
Shame is a very powerful feeling, and I think it drives a lot of humans to do both good things and bad. Some people are ruled by it more than others. But the thing about shame is that it often lies. Especially in self-loathing people.
Each of these characters, myself included, believes himself to be a Bad Person, and for good reason. Lorcan killed an indeterminate number of people for an evil queen he blindly loved. Loki betrayed good people over and over and over to save himself. Sawyer was just…well, rude (and he was a con man). There are good reasons why any man believes himself to be unlovable. Often other people will not let him forget all the wrong he’s done. But I think we as humans can punish ourselves for things far longer than necessary. We atone for our sins, we rectify them or apologize or attempt to do better next time, and yet we still hound ourselves for the wrong-doing. We cannot see through the haze of our sin to see ourselves clearly. We cannot believe that doing a bad thing does not make us Bad People.
This is why so many people of this antihero archetype create distance between them and everybody else. Not only do we believe we are the problem, but we cannot believe that we could ever be forgiven enough to start over, to be different. We believe the lie that our past actions define us more than our present ones. Sometimes the past can feel so insurmountable, that no matter what we do or say now, that thing we did once will always be there to remind us of the Bad lurking inside us. So we stew in that darkness because it’s all we have.
It is so difficult letting anybody in to see the darkness within us because we are afraid that the darkness is bigger than we ever imagined. That our specific brand of bad is unforgivable. That we are unlovable no matter what we do. We always have been.
And yet there is some small part of us that hopes that maybe, just maybe, this person or these people might be the answer to our prayers. Maybe there is someone who won’t be afraid of that thing lurking inside you. Maybe they’re willing to do the work that others would not. Maybe they would teach you how to be good.
For each of the characters I’ve listed (and almost every other that fits this archetype), there is a counterpart. Sometimes this is a partner, a lover, a single person who chooses to spend the rest of their existence together. Sometimes it’s a group of people, a family, a group of friends. But often, it’s both of these things in tandem. It’s a community that works together to bring somebody back from the brink of despair, of shame, of darkness, and into the world of the living once more.
It seems like hard work to me. The people I’ve had who do this for me, the characters I’ve seen on screen…they walk down this path knowing that it is treacherous. Not because there is not love there, but because antiheroes are broken people. They are rabid dogs who haven’t been cared for in a very long time. They fight back. They protect themselves. They don’t open up as easily as you’d hope. And this is true even if they have decided to Be Better, to stick around, to commit to being someone else.
But the thing that is so miraculous to me is that the people with Light inside them do not seem to care. Characters like Stede Bonnet or Elide Lochan or Emma Swan are not afraid to go to hell themselves in order to make their counterparts understand their own goodness. Because that is what happens almost every time: there isn’t a lot of change that needs to happen. Maybe an attitude adjustment, maybe some honest communication, the shifting of a few priorities. But the big change that I always expect from these characters is actually just that they need to learn how to love themselves first.
🤯
It’s like a huge bait-and-switch. You spend so much of the story believing this bad guy needs to repent and learn the error of his ways, but usually he has beaten himself so thoroughly to a pulp, that his darkness is all a result of his own self-loathing. If you spend enough time by yourself and bully yourself enough times for your past mistakes, you’ll start to convince yourself and the world that you are evil and mean and rude and selfish and dark and bad. Sometimes what you really need is for someone to look at you head on, and tell you to your face that you are a good person who is lovable.
Of course, part of the problem is that it isn’t that easy to convince someone they are lovable, especially the type of person who has convinced themself so whole-heartedly that they are irredeemable. It’s often a long road, one with a lot of detours. Some days you believe the hero, some days you believe the voices in your head from past villains. It is so much easier to carry on believing what you always have. It is so much easier to keep being your own villain. What’s harder is facing yourself and having compassion for yourself and loving yourself. What’s harder is allowing someone else to love you, all of you, even the parts you want to hide.
But I find so much comfort in the characters that accomplish it. It’s so powerful to watch the backslides, the fight. To know that sometimes it’s all just a miscommunication, that someone isn’t actually bad at heart, they just don’t know how to share their feelings. That people lash out when they’re scared or when they feel threatened. That sometimes people do good things even when they are bad.
And more than that, I find comfort in reading about the characters who walk side by side with their antihero into hell itself. It’s powerful to witness someone who is so inherently Good standing there, holding the hand of someone who hates themself, whispering, You are good. Over and over and over until it sticks. Even as the antihero fights against them, bites them and kicks them and screams at them to leave. It’s like exorcising a demon.
At the end of the day, this antihero archetype is often just smoke and mirrors. It’s like a paradox almost, that this one person was told so frequently that they are a bad person, that now they only see themselves as bad…even if the bad thing they did wasn’t actually that bad after all.
And quite honestly, as much as I see myself and my characters as a Certain Type of Person, I think probably a huge majority of people see themselves this way. There’s so much gray area in the world, and it’s so hard to label anyone as “all good” or “all bad,” and I think a lot of us deal with shame and self-loathing. It’s not a unique thing, it just feels like it is when you’re stuck in your head.
We spend so much time shrinking people and shrinking ourselves because we believe that smaller is better. We try to feel less, to talk less, to care less, but the truth is that shrinking yourself only leads to sorrow. Because the people who are fighting for you, who care about you even when it’s difficult, even when you don’t really care about yourself, they want the biggest version of you there is. They want you to take up space. To be messy. To argue with them. And that may be difficult to believe, you may spend a lifetime learning how to accept that, but it’s the truth.
It’s kinda like the age-old concept: if you’re overly-worried that you’ll become the bad guy, chances are you are not the bad guy.
And besides…sometimes being selfish is the kindest thing you can do.
I’m starting to realize how much we have in common after years of following you on social media. I also understand why you love Throne of Glass so much. I wish i had found you Substack much sooner.
absolutely beautiful and so well written (also i loved the wicked analogy!!!!)
i think everyone can relate to this in some way or another- i know i did.