everyone is a monster to someone

On misunderstanding, villainization, and the freedom that comes from letting go of someone else’s story about you.

There is a quiet, heavy moment that happens at the end of a long misunderstanding. It is the moment you realize you have run out of words to defend your own humanity. You have handed over your context, your reasons, your grief, and the softest parts of your history, and none of it mattered. The jury returned a verdict before you even took the stand.

We live in a world obsessed with clarity, closure, and being the good guy.
We curate our lives to look gentle.
We explain ourselves in long, exhausting paragraphs, hoping that if we just find the right combination of syllables, the other person will finally say,
Oh, I see you now. I see your heart.

But the older I get, the more I realize that some people do not want to see your heart. They need your harm. They need it because it makes sense of their own pain.

It is a comforting fiction to believe that every wound we carry was given to us by a deliberate, cartoonish evil. It saves us from the terrifying truth that sometimes good people just hurt each other, that sometimes timing is a parasite, and that we are all, at any given moment, incredibly messy.

So, what do you do when someone is entirely convinced that you are the architect of their ruin?

You let them have it.

It is a strange, heartbreaking kind of freedom. You look at the person who used to know the cadence of your laugh, the person who saw you at your most fragile, and you realize they have painted horns on your memory. And instead of fighting for the paintbrush, you just step out of the frame.

Everyone is a monster to someone.
It is an uncomfortable truth we try to ignore.

On the Beach at Night Alone (2017)

Somewhere out there, in a story you have no control over, you are the antagonist.
You are the toxic ex.
You are the cold friend.
You are the selfish colleague.
You are the reason someone went to therapy.
You are the reason someone stayed up until three in the morning crying on their kitchen floor.

You might not have meant to be.
You might have been drowning yourself at the time.
But in their version of the narrative, you were the storm.

We carry so much shame about this. We spend so much energy trying to audit our reputations, trying to make sure everyone agrees that we are fundamentally good. But society has become so fragile, so deeply fractured, that we no longer have room for nuance. We need monsters. We need clear lines between the victim and the villain because it makes a chaotic world feel structured.

If you are the monster, then they are entirely innocent, and innocence is the highest currency we have right now.

When I finally accepted this, something in me broke, but it broke open.

I remember the exact moment I stopped pleading my case. I was looking at a face that used to represent safety, but it had hardened into a mirror of absolute certainty. They were looking at me not as a person who had made a mistake, but as a person who was a mistake. Every word I said was twisted to fit a script they had already written.

In that moment, the exhaustion settles into my bones.
It is a deep, hollow ache.
I realize that my survival in their life depends on my villainy.
If I take away their grievance, I take away their identity.

So I look at them, and with a heart completely broken but a voice entirely quiet, I decide to stop fighting.

If you are so convinced that I am the monster in your story, then I will be it. I will give you the villain you need to make sense of your narrative. I will bear the weight of your blame if it helps you sleep at night.

I will stop trying to show you my light.
I will let you believe in my darkness.

There is a terrible sadness in this surrender. It means letting go of the hope of being understood. It means allowing a version of me to exist in the world that is ugly, unfair, and completely distorted. It means walking away while they tell everyone their version of what happened, knowing I will never step forward to give mine.

But it is also the only way to get my life back.

I cannot heal while standing in the courtroom of someone else’s judgment.
I cannot grow if I am constantly trying to revise a book that someone else is writing.

Let them have the last word.
Let them feel the righteous anger that protects them from their own accountability.

We are all just clumsy people trying to navigate a world that demands perfection.
We will hurt people we love.
We will fail the people who trusted us.
We will be the villain in a few chapters, no matter how hard we try to be the hero.

The tragedy is not that someone thinks you are a monster.
The tragedy is spending the rest of your life trying to prove to them that you are not, losing your own peace in the process.

So, let the shadows fall where they may.
Walk out of the courtroom.
Let the door close behind you.
It is a lonely walk into the quiet, and the air is cold, but at least the trial is finally over.

You are finally free,
even if you had to become their monster to buy that freedom.