I had to become the villain in others’ stories so I could live freely as the hero in my own.

I’ve been thinking lately about the concept of heroes and villains, of stories and how they’re told. I blame my current surplus of time for summer reading…or the current state of political affairs in this country and indeed in the world…or my newfound love for some refrains in Hamilton…or my daughter’s enthusiasm for Despicable Me these days. Or all of the above and then some. I don’t know. What I do know is that society wants us to cleanly dichotomize heroes and villains, but in my experience, you can’t primly tie someone up with a bow and tag them as definitively one or the other. So much depends on perspective. People always say they want the truth — but whose truth?

My daughter asked me once where I learned how to do something, and when I told her honestly that I’d learned it from my mother, she protested: “But Mama, your mother was a villain!” It’s how she made sense of the fact that I don’t have a relationship with my mother, a simplistic conversation we had a couple of years ago. For now, at her age, it will do. Anyway, it gave me pause, as it always does, and finally I replied, “Yes, she is a villain…but I didn’t always know that.”

It feels in my body a lot of the time like breaking free from the cycle of toxic narcissistic abuse in my family required nothing short of heroics. To others who are working through the same struggles, I’ve been hailed as inspiring and helpful, an example to follow (no pressure…?). To those whom I left behind, I am undoubtedly villainous, however. You see, narcissists will never own up to their own mistakes; they must always be either the hero or the victim in their story, but never the villain. They will deny any wrongdoing, and if the wrongdoing is too undeniable, they’ve got a bag full of parlor tricks to excuse it all away, from gaslighting to downright lies. “I never said that! And if I did, you must not have heard me right. And if you did hear me right, you must have misunderstood me, and that’s your own fault!” Anyone not on their guard who listens to a narcissist is susceptible to falling for their illusions, and therefore they’ll defend the narcissist against their victims. I’ve lost a number of relationships with family and friends in this way; actually, that sounds too passive and happenstance. To clarify, I’ve had to deliberate carefully and then choose to cut off a number of my relationships with family and friends because if they’ve sided with my abusers, they are not someone I can trust or feel safe with.

The thing about drawing lines in the sand is that sand shifts. Sometimes, therefore, so do your lines. You have to occasionally reassess the situation and figure out which lines can dissipate and which lines need reinforcing. I am extremely careful with who I keep in the sea of my life and at what depth I allow them to swim. I don’t think I’m a hero, but I also do not feel that I’ve done anything so villainous. Others disagree, either way. What I’ve learned above all is that you cannot control the narrative; you cannot control how others see you or why they see you that way. All you can control is your own actions, your own choices, and it is up to you to make peace with the fallout, accepting that how people perceive you is their problem, not yours.

They’ll tell their stories about you. You have to let them. Only YOU get to tell YOUR story.