Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

One of the most iconic cinema moments of my childhood was the moment E.T., the mislaid extraterrestrial, taps his friend Elliot on the chest with a glowing finger, admonishing the child to “be good” before he steps back onto his spaceship and heads for parts unknown.

That phrase has been used by parents on their offspring for generations. Loving parents, neglectful parents, abusive parents, teachers, preachers, and even alien scientists have all told us to “Be good.”

Not one of them has told us what the hell that really means.

I’m honestly not sure they even know.

One parent may really mean “study hard, get good grades, and become a doctor”, another may mean “be healthy, and happy and don’t hurt anyone”. A less than stellar parental unit may mean “I don’t care what you do, just leave me the heck alone”.

Funny thing is, somewhere inside, we all still want to please those people, even the ones that weren’t really worth the effort. We all want to be good, we just may not even know what good is any more.

Once upon a not necessarily better time, society had some pretty rigid rules in place. You knew what was expected of you, even if it was ridiculous. Things have changed so fast, and in so many ways, that it is little wonder many of us suffer from a vague but nagging belief that there is something deeply wrong with us.

Let’s face it, if you really want to be good, but you have nothing to measure your success against, you will probably never feel like you’re succeeding. This leads to feelings of sadness, poor self-image, low confidence, and even depression. No, I am not a psychologist, just a human being with the same host of issues everyone else struggles with, and this is one of them.

To be perfectly frank, I might never have understood it if I weren’t a writer. You see, even the ‘bad guys’ have to view themselves as good for a story to usually work. Fully evil characters, while possible, are rarely as fun for the reader as a character that we can understand, so their motivations, while twisted, have to be understandable.

One night, while rather fruitlessly trying to figure out the motivations of a ‘bad’ character, I decided in frustration to simply write down what I thought of as ‘good’ and use the opposites. There may, or may not, have been a bit of alcohol involved.

That’s when I discovered that my concept of ‘be good’ needed some serious work.

I could list some things that were pretty obvious, like not killing people, but the majority of that concept was really fuzzy to me. As I wrote down the things that popped into my head, I realized that I didn’t even agree with a great many of them, yet they still hung out somewhere in my subconscious.

Some of the more annoying things I found in that file? ‘Don’t speak when the men are speaking. Always go last. Never get angry. Obey’ and the list goes on.

To say I wasn’t thrilled by this discovery is a bit of an understatement, but it was a very helpful exercise. As young children, we take in everything we see, read, or is said to us as if it is the truth, because we lack any structure to compare it to before the age of seven or so. After that, it is much easier for us to decide if we want to keep something in our worldview or not, but those first entries remain, often unchallenged throughout our entire lives.

I’d like to invite you to do a little weeding of those mental rules for ‘being good’. Sit down and actually make a list of everything that pops into your head when you say that phrase, whether you agree with it or not. I suspect you will find a few items in your list that you never knew were there, and that are about as welcome as an infestation of roaches.

After you’ve taken out the trash, so to speak, you may also find that you need to replace the outdated things you pitched with some newer, more appropriate measures. Again, actually writing them down goes a long way to making them ‘stick’ in your head.

Keep at it, and eventually you will have what you consciously believe makes a ‘good’ person, and what your subconscious believes actually being the same thing, which eases the frustrations and guilt that you feel.

Whatever else you do, remember that you are the only one that can be you. Keep at it, we need you.

Cheers,

Michelle