Dila Cakir

There’s always a villain in everyone’s story.

A friend who abandoned you when you needed them most. A person who made you feel small. A coworker who frustrated you. We tell the stories enough times that they eventually become part of who we are.

A villain gives a story direction. They give our pain a reason. They make it easier to explain why we struggle to let people in. I think about how we often search for our own misfortune. We are encouraged to turn our pain into a lesson, our struggles into a personality, our worst experiences into something that makes us stand out.

And of course, hard things happen. Some people really have been through things that change them forever. But I wonder if somewhere along the way, we started believing that being hurt makes us more interesting. That suffering makes us more deserving of love.

There is something comforting about believing that the people who hurt us were simply bad people. It means we were good. It means we did our best, loved too hard, gave too much and somehow ended up on the wrong side of someone else’s cruelty.

But somewhere out there, you are the villain too.

You are the friend who stopped trying. The ex who didn’t care enough. The name that comes up when someone explains why they can’t open up. We remember the ways we do good, rarely recognizing where we have gone wrong. We are remarkably forgiving of ourselves. Sometimes you have to be left knowing that a person you cared about thinks poorly of you.

Victimhood can be tempting because it gives us permission to put our anger, our disappointment and our embarrassment onto something, or someone. And sometimes, without even realizing it, we begin to need the story where the villain caused the agony. But more often than not, it’s distracting us from why we really hurt.

And although it is heartbreaking in its failure to truly know someone, sometimes we should surrender to being the villain in someone’s story, to let that help explain their pain.

I wonder how much of our lives we spend trying to convince people that we are good. You can spend your life trying to change their mind or you can accept that versions of you exist entirely outside your control.

That is a strange kind of grief: letting someone misunderstand you. Letting them keep the version of you that you have spent so long trying to correct. Accepting that you might never get to explain yourself in a way that makes a difference. But maybe there is freedom in it, too.

You don’t have to win every argument that takes place in your absence. You do not have to turn every bad ending into a story about who was in the wrong. Maybe the next time we find ourselves in someone else’s story, we can resist the urge to rewrite every sentence. Let yourself see if they are in the interest of understanding you or painting you as evil.

We will be loved by people who eventually stop loving us. We will be remembered in ways that feel unfair. But we will also be selfish when we should have been generous and silent when we should have spoken up.

Somewhere, we will be the villain. And somewhere else, we will be the person who tried to make a positive impact. Both versions can exist at once.

Maybe growing up is learning that being a good person does not mean leaving everyone with a good impression of you. Maybe it means admitting that pain makes us selfish—that we look for somewhere to put it and someone to blame because it’s easier to make someone the villain than to sit with the hurt itself.

There is a difference between telling your story and needing someone else to be the monster in it.

Lily Mott is a member of the Class of 2028.