Nobody Is the Villain in Their Own Story

The car cut them off in traffic, close and careless, and the word that came out was villain, more or less, delivered with real heat at a stranger through two panes of glass. What an awful person. Who drives like that. And somewhere ahead, in that other car, was a person driving home who did not think of themselves as awful at all, who had a reason that made sense to them, a running-late, a distraction, a bad day, and who was, in the movie of their own life, the harried protagonist, not the villain of anyone's.

This is one of the quietest and most useful things a person can understand, and it is almost impossible to hold onto for more than a minute. Everybody is the main character of their own story. Every single person, including the ones who wrong you, the driver, the coworker, the one who let you down, is at the center of a narrative in which they are the one trying, the one with reasons, the one doing their best under circumstances you cannot see. Nobody wakes up and casts themselves as the bad guy. The bad guy is always someone else's role, assigned from the outside.

We know this about ourselves perfectly and forget it about everyone else. When we do something careless or unkind, we have instant, full access to the reasons, the context, the bad day, the thing that explains it, and so we forgive ourselves easily, because we can see the whole story. When someone else does the same thing, we see only the act, stripped of all context, and we assign it to their character. They cut me off because they are a bad person. I cut someone off because I was having a hard day. Same act. Two completely different explanations, and the difference is only whose story we have access to.

The philosophers who pushed us to consider the plank in our own eye before the speck in someone else's were pointing at this asymmetry. We judge ourselves by our intentions, which we can see, and everyone else by their actions, which is all we get. And so other people appear, constantly, to be worse than we are, more careless, more selfish, more villainous, when the truth is that we simply cannot see their reasons the way we see our own, and if we could, most of the villains would dissolve back into ordinary people having ordinary hard days.

This is humbling in a way that is worth sitting with, lightly. Because it means that you, too, are the villain in stories you will never hear. Somewhere, someone is telling a friend about the awful thing you did, the careless word, the moment you let them down, and in their telling you are the antagonist, flat and unreasonable, stripped of all the context that would explain you. You know you had reasons. They do not. To them you are simply the bad guy, and there is nothing you can do about it, because they do not have access to your story, the same way you do not have access to the drivers.

And it is freeing, too, in the same motion. Because if most people are not villains but protagonists with reasons you cannot see, then most of the harm that comes at you is not malice. It is other people being the center of their own world, distracted, struggling, doing their best in a story where you are, at most, a minor character who wandered through at a bad moment. That does not excuse real cruelty, which exists. But it does dissolve an enormous amount of the daily anger we carry, the heat we spend on strangers and coworkers whose crime was mostly just being the main character of a life that is not about us.

None of this requires becoming a doormat, or pretending harm does not happen, or handing everyone a pass. Some people do real damage, and reasons are not the same as justifications. But holding, even loosely, the awareness that the person who wronged you is the hero of their own story, with reasons you cannot see, tends to take most of the poison out of the smaller wrongs, the traffic and the emails and the ordinary carelessness, which is where most of our anger actually goes.

The car sped off ahead, its driver already forgetting the whole thing, off to be the protagonist of the rest of their day. And the heat drained out a little, replaced by something quieter, the recognition of a fellow main character, having a hard day, in a story that was never about anyone but themselves.

Nobody is the villain in their own story. Which means the villains, mostly, are just people, seen from the outside, without their reasons.

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Perhaps while reading this you thought of someone you have cast as the villain, and considered, for a moment, the story they are the hero of, with reasons you cannot see.

I wonder why we judge ourselves by our intentions, which we can see, and everyone else by their actions, which is all we get, and how many villains would dissolve back into ordinary people if we had access to their reasons the way we have access to our own.

You might, the next time someone wrongs you in a small ordinary way, hold lightly the fact that they are the protagonist of a story you will never hear, having a hard day you cannot see. It does not excuse real cruelty. But it takes most of the poison out of the small stuff, which is where most of our anger quietly goes.