Good and Bad People

Here is my usual Thursday morning illegal admin post:

I have had a realisation.
I was reading Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult. It was in the mind of the character Amelia who was sister to the girl who had brittle bone syndrome and who the whole book is about. In this particular part Amelia was reflecting on herself as a person, just as I was before in my blog. And in it she said that she hated herself.

She said that she hated herself because sometimes she would wish bad things would happen to other people. She would sometimes wish that her sister had never been born, that her sister had died young, that her mother wasn’t so occupied with her sister, that her family could be normal, that the bullies at school would pick on someone else, that all the bad things that had happened to her would happen to someone else. She hated herself because she thought these things.

When I read that I was shocked. It was like those few paragraphs had been taken straight out of my mind and printed into that book. Sometimes I think bad things like that, that bad things would happen to someone else instead of me. And then I would hate myself for thinking those things.

After reading about Amelia, though, I realised something.
This is the difference between a good person and a bad person.

A good person doesn’t not think bad things. Everyone thinks bad things; we cant help it, they just pop into our heads uninvited. The difference between a good person and a bad person is that a bad person doesn’t realise that those thoughts are bad, they don’t hate themselves for thinking them.
But a good person does.
A good person will hate themselves for thinking those horrible thoughts and they will try their hardest not to think them. But a bad person doesn’t do this; they don’t realise when their thoughts are horrible or nasty.

It wasn’t until I saw, or rather read, about another person who also hated themselves for thinking horrible thoughts, saw their whole situation from a perspective other than their own, that I realised this. When you hate yourself for thinking things you cant see the whole situation. You need to be able to take yourself outside of your body and view the whole picture before you can judge whether you are a good or bad person. Also, you cant judge someone else, because you don’t know them completely, you don’t know what goes on in their head that they don’t tell you.

Only you can make a judgement on whether you are good or not, and only you can make a choice to change that. But you need to see the entire picture.

A good person is one who thinks that they are bad.