I've Officially Entered My Villain Era

On abandoning the good girl, reclaiming my anger, and no longer being the bigger person.

For most of my life, I have made a conscious effort not to become the kind of person who hurts me. I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of someone’s anger, cruelty, and disregard, and I never wanted to make another person feel the way I have felt. So I learned to consider people’s feelings, even when they weren’t considering mine. I learned to choose my words carefully, extend grace when I probably shouldn’t have, and walk away from conversations with things I desperately wanted to say without ever uttering a word.

I’m 37 now, and I’m beginning to wonder what all that consideration has actually gotten me. Somewhere along the way, my determination not to hurt other people became an expectation that I would keep letting them hurt me. I got so used to being the bigger person that I rarely stopped to consider why everyone expected me to “do the right thing.”

I no longer care about being the good girl. In fact, I think I’ve finally entered my villain era.

I’ve spent much of my adulthood trying to understand people who have made very little effort to understand me. I’ve considered their childhoods, their circumstances, their intentions, and the possibility that they simply didn’t know any better. I’ve made allowances for things I would never dream of doing to another person because I understand people are complicated, and everyone carries experiences the rest of us know nothing about.

For years, I believed understanding someone meant I should be more forgiving of their behavior. If I could identify what their actions were rooted in, perhaps I could find a reason not to take them personally. What I failed to recognize was how often I used my understanding of other people to talk myself out of acknowledging what they had done to me.

I still believe people deserve compassion, but someone’s experiences may explain why they behave the way they do without making me responsible for accepting it. I can understand why someone is cruel without volunteering to be the person they practice their cruelty on.

When I think about the person I was taught to be, I realize how much of my understanding of goodness was connected to how I made other people feel. Being respectful meant watching my tone and not standing up for myself. Being mature meant knowing when to walk away. Being understanding meant giving people another opportunity to do better, even when their behavior suggested they had no intention of changing.

People always expected me to find a more appropriate way to express my disappointment. If someone said something hurtful, I should calmly explain why it bothered me. If someone disrespected me, I should communicate my boundaries. If someone repeatedly crossed those boundaries, I should remove myself without allowing my emotions to get the best of me. None of that sounds unreasonable until you consider how often the responsibility to stay composed falls on the person who’s been hurt.

I’ve watched people become more offended by someone’s reaction to their behavior than by the behavior itself. The moment you raise your voice or express your anger, the conversation shifts from what happened to how you’ve chosen to respond. Suddenly, your tone is the problem, and the person who had no difficulty disregarding your feelings expects you to show extraordinary consideration for theirs.

Now that I can reflect, I don’t think I ever really cared about being perceived as nice. I care about being a decent person and treating others with the consideration I would appreciate receiving. But somewhere along the way, people began mistaking my consideration for an inability to defend myself, and I let that misunderstanding continue because correcting it would have required me to get comfortable making other people uncomfortable.

The new me says, “fuck their comfort.”

One thing I’ve been confronting in adulthood is how much anger I’ve carried without giving myself permission to express it. It took this anger to show up in my physical appearance for me to take it seriously. I convinced myself that walking away was the more mature response, even when I found myself replaying conversations and thinking about everything I should have said. I mistook silence for resolution because I had successfully avoided an argument.

I’ve walked away from situations that continued to bother me for days, weeks, and sometimes years. Meanwhile, the people responsible probably went about their lives without thinking about the interaction again, while I was stuck reliving the disrespect and wondering why I hadn’t defended myself when I had the opportunity.

I’ve spent much of my life trying to make sense of my experiences through writing. I can sit with complicated emotions, examine their origins, and turn them into something thoughtful. I value that ability, but I don’t want to intellectualize every experience that makes me angry. Maybe sometimes violence is the only correct response?

I don’t always want to find a lesson or turn someone’s disrespect into another opportunity for personal growth. Sometimes, I want to tell someone exactly what the fuck I think about them. I want to say what I mean without spending forever rewriting it in my head to make sure it sounds acceptable. I want the freedom to be angry without immediately feeling responsible for making that anger easier for someone else to receive.

I adapted to treating anger as something I needed to contain because I knew what it felt like when someone else couldn’t contain theirs. I understood the damage that could come from words spoken with the intention of hurting someone, and I was determined not to become a person who used my emotions as an excuse to mistreat others. What I no longer want is to be so afraid of resembling the people who hurt me that I abandon myself in the process.

I’ve felt anger physically, even after convincing myself that I had moved on. The tension in my body, the conversations playing in my mind, and the frustration of knowing I had swallowed something I desperately wanted to say reminded me that my silence hadn’t made the experience disappear. I know cursing someone out won’t undo the harm they’ve caused, but I’m no longer convinced that keeping my anger to myself is always the healthier or more respectable choice.

I’ve started to resent the phrase “be the bigger person,” especially because people use it so often to encourage someone to tolerate behavior they would never accept themselves. You have to forgive because holding someone accountable might create tension. You have to maintain relationships because walking away could hurt someone’s feelings or disrupt a family dynamic. Eventually, being the bigger person can feel like having the most to lose by telling the truth.

I’ve learned that some people are perfectly comfortable with your pain as long as it doesn’t inconvenience them. They can tolerate your disappointment when it’s quiet and overlook your frustration when you continue showing up. They struggle when you stop participating.

Adulthood has taught me that people don’t always respond well when you change, especially when the version of you they’ve grown accustomed to has benefited them. Someone who has always been available becomes selfish when she starts protecting her time. Someone who has always been understanding becomes unreasonable when she stops accepting excuses. The arrangement changes, and suddenly you’re the problem.

I used to worry about those perceptions because I wanted people to understand my intentions. Now, I recognize that explaining myself doesn’t guarantee someone will interpret my actions fairly. Some people may decide I’ve become cold, difficult, or bitter because I no longer respond the way I once did. You know what I say to that? Oh well! Perhaps I have changed!

I’ve experienced enough to reconsider what I owe people, what I expect from my relationships, and how much of myself I’m willing to sacrifice to maintain a favorable impression. I don’t want to become cruel or move through life looking for opportunities to hurt people simply because someone once hurt me. But I’m no longer interested in being harmless at my own expense.

I can be compassionate without being endlessly accommodating. I can recognize someone’s humanity and still decide I don’t like how they treat me. I can also stop making my willingness to remain kind dependent on someone else’s willingness to behave decently. I don’t regret being considerate. What I regret is how often I confused honoring my values with giving other people unlimited opportunities to disregard them.

For most of my life, I measured my responses against the harm I had experienced, constantly asking myself whether I was becoming the kind of person I once needed protection from. I rarely asked whether the person I was becoming could protect me.

I think that’s what I’m finally ready to find out. If that makes me the villain in someone’s story, I’m willing to live with it. I’ve spent enough of my own story trying to be the good girl in everyone else’s.