As the sun’s rays sting my skin with mockery and the moon mirrors the sun’s contempt with me, I wonder if my life will always be this continuous cycle of attempting to hide from the sun’s view in the shadow of shame. With reluctance and aching in my wounded bones, I remove my mental hero’s cape and lift my white flag of surrender to the sky. I no longer want to fight this battle with myself or with God.

For years, I have walked the earth purposeless, and for years I assigned myself the role as hero to hide this truth. Fearing that I might be forgotten in my useless state, I convinced myself that I was born pure with a mission to protect humanity from its evil. I played judge, jury, and executioner, spending my days attacking those who I believed to be bad people. I punished the sinners in the name of God, becoming a sinner myself. And as I beat the thief into sinlessness without remorse, I declared aloud that I was doing it to save his soul, while the bones in my knuckles were broken from the blows that I inflicted on him. Though my skin’s been torn from my many fights with villains, I announced to an ashamed God that I would kill a million along with myself for the greater good. Then, I met my match who thought that I was a villain in his eyes, and for his greater good he nearly killed me.

My wounds have taught me that when we tell ourselves that we are good people, we become caricatures of the person we proclaim ourselves to be. We start setting expectations of what a good person should look like, hoping to see the reflection of ourselves in faces of others and labelling those who do not fit our mold as bad people. I see now that the label of good can be blinding; it can cause us to be accepting of the imperfect like ourselves while expecting them not to make mistakes that differ from ours. As I slash my wounds to get a deeper clean, I weep in shame, for when I told myself that I was a good person, I stopped looking for the bad within myself. I stopped seeing my own need to change. I forgot that I was mortal. I’d like to think that when the sun shines down on our faces, he is not doing it simply to warm us, but to warn us that we are all just people, and that whether we believe ourselves to be good or bad we still burn easily.