I had used this title once before, years ago, in an old piece of writing.
This morning, while working out, I finally finished the second season of Sex Education, which I had been dragging out for a while. In the last episode, Ola says something to Otis that lands right on the center of his character: you keep trying so hard to be a "good person," but in the end you only turn into a "bad person."
That line hit me harder than I expected. If I had seen that episode ten or fifteen years earlier, maybe I would not have worked so hard, for so long, at being "good." Then again, when I thought about it more carefully, all my efforts to be good never made other people especially happy anyway.
If I trace that impulse back, the clearest origin is a childhood incident I spent years pretending had never happened.
For a long time, my parents thought I was an obedient, timid kid. At school, though, I was almost the opposite. I talked during class, got punished by teachers, got sent to the office after school to wait for my parents. Back then we loved playing these ridiculous high-risk chasing games on the metal climbing frame in the school playground.
And when boys played together, things could get gross. Spitting at each other from the climbing frame, that kind of thing.
Eventually someone reported our "dangerous game." I was pulled out as the main culprit and publicly denounced in class. The teacher started by asking who had been spat on by me, then made them line up one by one starting from the classroom door and extending toward the podium. Plenty of those kids had never even played with me. I remember wanting to protest—or maybe I did protest—but the report had been anonymous, and because I did not know who had actually turned us in, I did not dare defend myself.
Then the charges widened. It was no longer just about the game. It also became about everyone I had supposedly influenced by talking during class. That part, to be fair, I have to admit. Even the "good students" seated next to me would end up talking because of me. But of course the one who got punished was me. Good students were not supposed to break rules on their own initiative.
I do not really remember how many people ended up standing there at the front of the classroom. Maybe I have deliberately erased the concrete details. What I do remember is this: all the people I had hurt, and all the people I had supposedly hurt, stood there, and I started from the door and went down the line crying, bowing to each of them, apologizing, promising I would never do it again.
After school that day, I was punished again and had to finish the cleaning by myself. I waited a long time until only my homeroom teacher was left in the office, then went to find her. I wanted to ask why I was the only one being punished. Her answer was simple: why can?t you just be a "good person"? If not, then why is it that every time there is trouble, your name is in it?
From that day on, I decided I should become a "good person."
I think I mostly managed it through middle school. At least, I spent those years in a compressed state, forcing myself not to stand out, not to fight unfairness in the name of fairness, not to argue against decisions other people had already made.
By high school, that rebellious streak had stopped staying under control. It came out once, and loudly. In English class, in front of the whole room, I stood up, pointed at the English teacher, and told him to get out.
I did it because my homeroom teacher had temporarily taken leave for surgery, and I could not stand hearing this substitute English teacher sneer about him.
By then everything around me had changed. My classmates were different; the atmosphere from middle school was gone. This was the first time my high school classmates saw that side of me, and nobody stood up with me. I was the only one who thought it was resistance.
A few days later, I was anonymously reported by my own class. This time I knew exactly who had reported me, but I had to pretend I did not, because the truth was humiliating: more than 80 percent of the class had signed on, asking for me to be expelled, or at the very least transferred to another class.
When my homeroom teacher returned from sick leave, he stopped it from going further. He asked why I had done it.
I told him that slut—specifically, the English teacher was a man, this was not meant as a slur against women—had already had issues with me back in middle school, and this time I just wanted to teach him a lesson, to stop him acting like he could look down on everyone.
My homeroom teacher said: but don?t you also look down on people? You wanted to protect your dignity, but you hurt someone too.
I said: I just wanted to be a good person. I didn?t want him talking badly about you.
He said: whatever he says, we can?t change it. Besides, I was already planning to leave this place. Once I leave, I have even less control over how he talks about me.
A group needs a "bad person" in order to maintain its balance. So I decided I would be that bad person.
After my first year, I chose the humanities track in a regular class and ended up separating from most of the people I had known before. It felt like getting another chance at becoming someone else. This time I decided I would stop halfway and go all the way: I would be a "bad person" completely.
Strangely, those later years of high school were the easiest I had felt in a long time. I did not need to please people. I did not need to preserve anyone else?s pride. I did not need to keep asking whether I had done something wrong. My social circle shrank hard, but what remained was small and real, and I was happier in it.
My homeroom teacher still found me exhausting, though. I would ask for leave from evening study hall because I was in a bad mood. I would insist that the fake, noisy reading before seven o?clock was unbearable and apply for the "privilege" of reading alone in the little school garden. If class bored me, I would wander off to find the geography teacher and watch her do experiments. I am sure he tried every possible way to "discipline" me. He made me class monitor, handed the entire New Year event design and planning over to me, and had me carry giant poster sheets around to handle the school display windows.
That period of high school felt less like ordinary school life and more like an experiment between him and me. I tried to extract privileges from him, to make my "bad person" identity more comfortable. He tried to figure out what switch inside me could still turn the "good person" mode back on.
Once he called me in for a talk. Students had been complaining to him that I was too disruptive, but by then he did not take it too seriously anymore. We were both used to the roles we played. He asked me: you once ranked eighth in the class. You clearly could study hard if you wanted. So why insist on being the annoying one?
I laughed out loud. Right there in the office, in front of teachers from other subjects, I said: according to the laws of development, there always has to be a bad person.
Even if I had suddenly started studying seriously then, people would only have said, look at that, they finally realized they were a lost cause and decided to work hard, but it?s too late now. Some stereotypes settle in from the start and never really loosen. I only understood that fully after several years of getting knocked around in working life.
There always has to be a bad person, because people need a bad person to define themselves against, to preserve the reason they cluster together, to hold up the self-respect they are proud of. And the same rule works on me too. I need to be different from them. I cannot become the kind of person they think I am. I cannot let them enjoy my failure.
In college I never went back to being a "good person," and once work began, the idea of a good-person persona became even more absurd. Looking back now, it feels less like rebellion and more like revenge against that earliest memory: being turned into the class enemy, then made to apologize to everyone one by one. I was retaliating against the version of myself that had once tried so hard to be good. Damaged pride, refusal to confess, whatever form it took—the whole script of trying to become "good" had already broken.
I have tried, like Otis, to be the kind of person who hurts no one and meets everyone?s expectations. It always ends the same way. In the end I hurt everyone, because one day I will inevitably fail to meet the expectations that keep growing.
I do not even want to describe those people as greedy. That sounds too negative, and I do not think that is the point. I think it is more like the way relationships seek equilibrium. The more you compromise, the more you serve, the more you do, the more the other side has to expand in order to balance the relationship. It is not a scale. It is like two gases in a closed space: when one is compressed, the other naturally expands to fill the empty area. Otherwise, what is that empty area there for? For another person? That is intolerable in love. For another set of rules? No, I pay you, so you should follow the arrangements made for you.
And then one day, when you want to resist, when you want more room for your own needs, that itself becomes an act of harm. There is no extra space left for you.
That is the dead loop underneath the categories of "good person" and "bad person," and it is what makes them so ridiculous.
If you decided from the start that I am the bad one, then no matter how hard I try to act good, everything I do will still be interpreted as bad. If you are the "good person," I assume you will always meet my needs, so I keep asking and asking. Then one day you get tired, you want some space of your own, and I leap up, point a finger at you, and say in wounded outrage: you never really loved me at all.
Seen that way, being the "bad person" is almost easier. I do not have to be responsible for one day no longer being bad. But a "good person" will eventually have to explain why they became bad. If a bad person turns good, they still will not win everyone over. But if a good person turns bad, they get pushed straight onto the stake and interrogated for what they have become.
I am almost grateful that I experienced both identities while I was still a student. As for that first buried memory, the one I have only now managed to bring up plainly—I am not going to thank that teacher for it. I spent twenty years repairing the inferiority that memory left in me. But it did make one thing brutally clear: if people have already decided I am bad, then no amount of apologies, promises, or guarantees will make me anything else. Those guarantees are more for the "good people" than for me. They are part of the rules they use to reassure themselves: at least this person will not be bad to me for now, because someone will always be there to keep them in line.
Of course, once you get older, another layer gets added: calculation. I often prefer "bad people" now because their motives are as obvious as mine. If you want money, then we talk about money. If what you want is vanity and admiration, then I can play the role that flatters you until you float.
But then there are still the "good people."
The ones who say: oh, I don?t care about anything. I don?t want anything. I just want to help you.
Those people can be just as calculating, only with better camouflage. So I have learned to do one thing: say the important part clearly, and leave a record. Fine—if you really want me to believe you want nothing, then let there be proof that you said so.
And somehow, after all that, I am still the "bad person."