December 20, 2008

Bad things, they happen to good people too!


When I was growing up, nobody bothered explaining!

They told me stories from religion and those from fairytales, all conforming that “good things happen to good people and that bad people always get what they deserve”, nothing could ever question that logic.

In the great attempt of encouraging me to be a good person, they forgot to bring my attention to the hardships good people have to face before they get the good they deserved. They forgot to teach me that “good things come to those who wait”, keyword: wait; they forgot to teach me about patience.

It took me 25 years of being an average good person –a very impatient one though-, to realize that I misunderstood a few important facts about life. I was “good” because I did not want bad things to happen to me. My goodness was all about inflicting no harm on others; the point was that no one would do to me the things I never did to others. If I disliked someone, the most damage I could do was showing it by not paying any attention to them; that made sense in my head because it was better than being a hypocrite.

In the process, the person I harmed the most was I. I was not a good person as far as I was concerned, but I didn’t see it because when it came to others I was my own weird version of all the fairytale characters I liked! I could not harm others, not intentionally at least, but I did harm myself, both intentionally and unintentionally! Needless to say, bad things came my way even when I thought I was being good.

It didn't stop there! The agony and the pain of thinking I was good and being so messed up blurred my thinking for quite a long time! Since I was never really the depressed kind of person, anger was my outlet. Seeing good people I know, having their own load of hardships did not help either; it was extremely beyond me to understand or accept that bad things do happen to good people. I kept getting angrier and more resentful of everything around me, and I became my own worst enemy.

Of course being married to a crazy person who manipulated all that to his own interest and being pregnant and hormonal twice in less than two years did not help at all!

It took me a bad marriage, and all the things that came along with it to find my way and learn so many lessons I did not even know I should learn! Around the past couple of years, I redefined my understanding of life and people.

It was such a revelation to figure out that life is not as black and white as I thought it was. Although actions speak louder than words, things people do cannot always be explained from a black/white perspective! People are not necessarily all good and definitely not all bad! It's more like supply and demand but in a more complicated way because the factors defining those curves are not in anyone’s hands to control.

That was my hardest lesson to learn. Bad things happen to good people! It was hard to accept bad things, to understand that how I react to them can either help me understand the how’s and why’s or can leave me confused and angry forever.

Patience on the other hand is still something so hard for me to practice, I usually distract myself until things pass, or tell myself to just sit there and wait for the reasons to prevail, but I wish I would be patient more gracefully, I’m still working on that.

19 comments:

Askandarani said...

what is good and what is bad? we cant judge as we cant know, bad things do happen to good people, even el rosol had their share of bad things.

it is how we accept them what realy matters

insomniac said...

my point, more or less :))

Unknown said...

Indeed bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people, and certainly vice versa. This is the basic idea of life.

I really like the post (:

insomniac said...

yeah! and you have no idea how baffling that was to me for a very long time!!

thanks (:

jessyz said...

My sister and I had a very similar conversation, she too thought that bad things should not happen to good people. I never thought the world worked that way. Shit happens, it's how we deal with it.

insomniac said...

i can see why your sis thinks that way... but it helps a lot to know that there is more to life than just that, and more importantly, that it's ok!

Umslopagas said...

Let's face it, what good do you get from being good, you get all the shit when someone else gets all the fun.

Recently this has been my line of thought,I'd love to be the dirty rotten scoundrel and give shit to someone else, but still too scared to go there.

I was there before, it felt good, but somehow, I'm unable to go back.

Maybe I'm wrong in wanting to go back, maybe I was wrong in coming here in the first place, so far it's been getting the shit instead of handing it to someone else.

Hmmm, maybe I should just go to sleep.

insomniac said...

i felt exactly the same for a while! but like i said, i never had it in me to harm others, so whatever anger or harm i had in mind always came my way, uncool!

so for me, there is no back :-/

cheer up dude :)

Umslopagas said...

**Takes a chill pill**.

Better thanks:D

insomniac said...

could you pass me one? i'm out of those!

Umslopagas said...

Just found out something at home, some caramel chip cookies.

I don't know why my mom hides this stuff from me, the other day, I found ginger biscuits.

Want some of those too?

insomniac said...

i think it's a mom thing!!!

my mom does that too! and oh my God, i hate admitting it, i hide stuff like that from my boys too!!! in my defence, they get too high on sugar, and the make a mess and ruin their teeth (YEAH RIGHT!)

not into anything caramel related (almost)... i'll trade your ginger biscuits with kinder chocolate ;) we still have some halloween candy left too ;D

Umslopagas said...

Sounds like a party in the making.

I'm still a kid when it comes to cookies:D

The.I.inside said...

patience is the most important ingredient , in all those fairy tales every single one of the "good" characters had their share of sh*t before the good came along. I wish I could fast forward my life past all the sh*t and lame stuff and go straight to the good stuff.
I changed my template, the other one didn't allow comments (although it was so Christmasy)

insomniac said...

patience is one of the things that are properly rated! i mean they tell you it's important and you keep boo-hoo-ing them, but truth is, it is important ;)

but they say (as cliche as it sounds) that the crap makes you appreciate the good stuff???

yeah, it was xmasy and cute but it took forever to load and did not even show comment option, touche!

Mayo said...

النار ما تحرقش مؤمن وان حرقته المؤمن منصاب
Yes dear, being good does not mean that you can fend off bad things from happening to you. However being good means standing on your feet, after the bad thing happens.

insomniac said...

mayooooooooooo :)

that's one way of putting it...

but someone comes to mind, and it still shakes me that he never stood up again after his misfortune!

like i said, it's hard to see the reason behind bad things happening to good people, but i tell myself there must be, wa2ela hatganen!

Gihan said...

Begad el post dah gamed geddan!

feeh kaza 7aga bass 3ayza awada7a:

1- The definition of good/bad: Remember sooret el kahf? the part where El 7'edr kills a young child JUST because his parents are GOOD people? Rabbena kan hay3awad 3aleehom w aslan el walad kan lamma haykbar kan hayb2a ta3'y w kafer.. so it was actually a blessing.. Very disguised, but still, since we dont know the "big picture", even Sayedna Musa was startled by the incident, then we could never really tell what is good and what is bad!

2- Mayo's comment: She said it right, the true quality of people is put to test ONLY when bad things happens. Normally for example, people wont lie or steal. But when things get really "bad" the bad people would find justification to lie and steal while the good ones STAND by their STANDards. So mel a7'er bad things is the ONLY thing that divide people into good or bad.

insomniac said...

kalam gameel ya gjoe :)

the thing is, it takes too much faith to hold on to such beliefs, to know that there is always good in the big picture....

and it takes twice as much strength to stand up to those standards....

most importantly, it takes patience... i don't know if faith gives us that or the other way around, but it's hard to have one without the other!