I think everyone is inherently good. For the most part. It’s circumstances and experiences that make people seem bad. Excepting the clinically mentally disturbed, which is an entirely other topic–I mean, we’re not going to talk about the Timothy McVeighs and the Adam Lanzas of the world here, most people, to me, are decent by nature.

There are so many synonyms for a “bad person.” Evil. Cruel. Selfish. Vindictive. What have you. In all honesty, I was a little bit of a bully in high school. Not in that I went out of my way to be cruel to people, and I certainly didn’t torture people, but I did my fair share of purposely belittling popular underclassmen and just straight-up being mean to my peers. I had no time for their pettiness and frivolity, or so I felt. The funny thing is, it was just a defense mechanism. I was mean because I was defending myself, and I was defending myself in anticipation of an imagined attack that was not only never realized, it was never even probable.

I spent a lot of years of my young life being angry: at pretty much everything. I later learned that, at my first high school, a few guys referred to me as “hot but scary.” The anger and the put-on toughness, though, wasn’t real. “I’m not gonna let some stupid boy take advantage of me just so he can tell all his buddies and laugh at me” And “I already know that girl won’t like me so I’ll just be mean.” These, of course, were self-fulfilling prophecies, because being mean to the girl made her not like me, and being mean to the boy made him tell all his buddies that I was, well, mean.

So where did this self-imposed need to so vehemently defend myself come from? That’s not exactly clear and the goal of this post is not to examine why. The fact of the matter is that “mean and angry” is not representative of my authentic self. Just the way some people acting overly sweet is not necessarily his or her authentic self, and not just because we are such multifaceted creatures.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of people out there who are genuinely kind and there are plenty of people out there who are truly mean. But I find its best to keep in mind that as people move through life, they change. Not to mention that we’re all different to some extent in various scenarious.

How do you act at work vs. at home vs. with certain groups of friends vs. with your family? You’d be hard-pressed to try to convince me that you’re the same in all of those situations.

I can tell you this:

• At home alone, I’m a quiet, lazy person who hits “snooze” on my alarm clock for two hours in the morning, laughs at my own farts, and tends to indulge in 3 glasses of wine in the evenings when I should have stopped at 1-1/2.
• With my college friends, I’m a loud, obnoxious person prone to making scenes and saying inappropriate things that really only appeal to 12-year-old boys.
• At work I’m pretty quiet until the afternoons, when I’ve been at my desk for far too long, and I start chatting about absolutely nothing important with anyone who will listen (and sometimes I just chatter at no one and hope someone will respond). I also often burst into song.
• When I’m with my parents, I vascillate, sometimes needy, sometimes emotional, and oftentimes either annoyingly hyper or puzzlingly quiet.
• With my boyfriend Jonathan I can go from snuggly to sarcastic in an instant.

Are any of those things my truly authentic self? Yes. They are all parts of my authentic self. They will never all come out in one setting. That just seems impossible.

People are complex.

I can’t decide if that’s a mouthful or an oversimplification.

Back to my original point: I think people are inherently good. I think what makes us view someone as “bad” is our inability (or perhaps unwillingness) to look beneath the surface, so to speak. I know a woman who seems like the most selfish person in the world to me. She wittingly “forgets” to pay her portion of a dining bill, to return a favor, to ask before she eats someone’s food in a social setting (even a stranger’s), or to even say “thank you” for getting a ride or for having her butt covered when she doesn’t have enough money. Is this woman a bad person? Of course not. She’s just selfish and I think she’s generally unaware that her actions grate on people.

Everyone knows people like this. They’re annoying as hell. And the only way to deal with them is to just avoid them at all costs. Seriously. Do you have any other suggestions? I literally blocked this woman on Facebook because she was “liking” my crap through mutual FB friends. In real life, I avoid her at all costs. And when I have to be around her–because we share so many friends and acquaintances–I try my best to ignore her and to bite my tongue, to not revert to a mean high school girl, to try to remind myself that this woman is just…oblivious to other people’s feelings.

So trying to bite my tongue and be nice when I really don’t want to be: is that a portrayal of my authentic self? Strangely, it is. Because who I really am doesn’t want to be mean, but still has that springboard reaction to defend myself against people who might hurt me, be it my feelings or, in this case, a woman who gloms onto the next person who shows her sympathy or kindness, and then takes advantage of that kindness. Oh yes, I’m defensive alright. But I could work on being a little more kind with this particular woman. Maybe even sympathetic.

People are complex. And if I keep going on this topic I might just drive myself nuts.