It's okay to be bad, mad and sad.

It’s unfortunate that we live in a time and place were there is a consistent expectation to be perfectly happy all the time. Humans are not perfect and also not consistent. Yes, you can control attitude and behavior, but after that, what can you control? And if you could, should you? At what point should a person allow life to affect them, to sway them, to impress them? We often spend so much time fighting life, we often don’t just stop and appreciate the moment and accept ourselves regardless of how not perfect we are during that slice of time.

We also have stopped admitting that we dislike things or people for that matter. We’ve stopped letting people know when they do something that is below par or unacceptable. Teachers are afraid to fail students, employers afraid to fire people, there are even laws about how if you list someone as a reference they can’t even destroy your character, even if you may deserve it because while you worked for them you stole money out of the cash drawer on a daily basis.

It’s almost like we’ve lost a piece of our freedom somehow. I once had a roommate that at the time we lived together processed every single quality I disliked about people. Granted, she had additional qualities, some I liked very much and she was in mind, for the most part, a good person. It just so happened that because of where life was taking her, well, actually, where she was taking herself, I could not agree or approve of many of the decisions she was making including small ones. In hindsight, this shouldn’t have mattered. However, because I live in a world where it is somehow very evil and wrong to think, much less say anything negative about someone, my opinions caused many problems. I even had people telling me that I was wrong for disagreeing with them and thinking she was anything less than how amazing they believed her to be.

It was tough, in some cases it came down to either losing my friends or losing the very base of my belief system. My ideas of what was morally and ethically right or wrong were even brought into question. In the end, I choose my beliefs, my basic sense of self, the core of my identity, or at least what was left after other life events changed it. For some odd reason, people still think if I had the chance I would want to hurt her, which in itself is odd. Just because I disapprove or dislike does not mean I hate or disrespect it to the point I would want to hurt her just for enjoyment. It just goes to show how little people know about me. From my point of view, it sucks that I don't have any contact with her, because that means I will never have the oppertunity to form a more positive opinion of her. I just have to take my fairly negative opinion of her to my grave.

A lot of good came from the experience of living with her though. You can learn a lot from people who live a life you would hate or despise. That experience reaffirmed my confidence that my fundamental ideas of good and bad are the right ones for me to have in my life. It helped me to understand why there is so much hate, how so many people refuse to listen, take criticism for what it is, allow life to touch them and grow and change into better version of themselves. I hesitate to say better people because that would imply something I don’t mean, that only by someone becoming more like me are they good people. There is good in every person. It’s just that it saddens me that people ignore opportunities to enrich their lives simply because they refuse to listen and take other’s seriously.

Oddly enough, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about this as well as being mad as heck that I had Queen’s bicycle song stuck in my head, which remained there, repeating itself for two hours until I feel asleep again. It was in wee hours I realized that I have never actually wrote down or made a list of the things I do not like about the human race, or qualities that have a tendency to rub me the wrong way much less what I would consider my core beliefs. I haven't listed what the qualities I most like about people. I think I’m going to add that to my list of things to do.