Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Things
We are all somehow, for better or worse, irrevocably marked by the trajectories of the lives we have lived.
You are not a good person.
And you are not a bad person.
You are just a person, like all the rest of us not-good-and-not-bad people out there.
You are just a person, and you have done Terrible-Horrible-No-Good-Very-Bad-Things.
And also, it must be noted, no small amount of Terrible-Horrible-No-Good-Very-Bad-Things have happened to you.
I know what you’ll say, that the Bad Things that happened to you were not as bad as some of the Bad Things that have happened to some other people out there, and look what you’ve made of your life anyway, and it could have been so much worse*.
*It’s true, the Bad Things that happened to you were not as bad as what happened to a whole lot of others, AND you have made a lot of your life, AND it could have absolutely, 100%, been so much worse. AND, they were much worse than many of the Bad Things that have happened to a whole lot of others. All of this is important, and also, none of it actually matters anyway.
There is no way to assign the events of our lives into any sort of Comparative Definable Hierarchy of Bullshit Endured. We are all stumble-tripping our way through a life that is, best as I can tell, an unpredictable collection of objective and subjective tragedies and beauties and wild and breathtaking unknowns.
But despite the absolute madness of any sort of comparative analysis of trauma and hardship, the things that happen—good and bad—change us. Irrevocably. Wholly. With an absolute inarguable, irrefutable finality.
Those changes are often entirely independent of any external measure of the magnitude of Terrible-Horrible-No-Good-Very-Badness. Just like a building that has survived an earthquake, the apparent solidity of the structure from an outside lens does not always indicate the severity of internal damage.
We can’t always know how, where, or even exactly why we are changed, but changed we are.
Sometimes, the Bad Things heal fully, but more often, they leave us with scars. Some of those scars make us stronger. We wear them proudly on the surface and point to them to say, “Look at the fresh hell that I have somehow once again survived.”
Sometimes, the Bad Thing Wound never quite heals, just cracks open and scabs over—half-ass patch jobs barely holding us together until we are a network of mostly invisible fault lines, praying that an earthquake doesn’t bring it all crashing down.
Sometimes, the Bad Things hide out, lodge in our guts like a war general who never learned a pathway to peace that didn’t involve a killing field, or maybe they stand at the bow of the boat, like a doomed ocean liner captain who has always known he’d go down with his ship. Either way, they have no plan that doesn’t involve destruction.
Sometimes the Bad Things freeze us in place, parts of us forever trapped in the age/body/space as we were when The Thing went down. An infinite lineup of fossilized selves, preserved and unchanging, frozen just as we were at the moment of impact.
Sometimes we bury the Bad Things so deeply and with such finality that we don’t even realize we have become an overcrowded graveyard of so many forgotten hurts. At least not until the buried alive start exhuming themselves just to get some god damn fucking air, already.
Whatever the result, I know this: there is no rhyme or reason to how we are changed by the circumstances of living, but the change itself is not optional.
We are all somehow, for better or worse, irrevocably marked by the trajectories of the lives we have lived, both the things done to us and the ones where we were the instigators of the doing.
Our bodies somehow hold all of it until they cannot hold anymore. Until the water rises, the levees are breached, and everything is underwater.
Until the center finally fails to hold, and the volcano erupts and it all spills out of the cracks, bubbles over or implodes, and collapses us from the inside out or outside in.
There isn’t a way around this. We cannot escape being marked by living. Nor can we escape being the one to do the marking. Saints and sinners we are, every last one.
It hurts too much, sometimes, to look at the ways our course has been altered by all that we’ve endured, all the fuckery thrust on us by forces beyond our control. It’s easier to focus on the havoc we have wrought in all our flailing fuckedupedness. To turn the arrow of vindication back toward our own tender hearts. To look at those we have harmed along the way and see this as proof of our undeniable villainy, our un-rehabilitatable mountain of shame.
We lean so heavily into the sticky, sweet pit of penance that, when we finally emerge, we are holding even more murky violence just below the surface, ready to seep out when we’re not looking and start the cycle again.
Counterproductive? Of course. But darling, we know that human-ing isn’t always the most sensible endeavor.
Sartre once said, “Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.” He was right (in the removed sort of way of 20th-century French existentialist philosophers who died before TikTok and AI and COVID and any number of other fuckeries that have forever changed the notion of what exactly can be done).
No matter the Terrible-Horrible-No-Good-Very-Bad-Things we’ve endured, we all have the (theoretical) capacity to choose the very best course of action available from the hand we’ve been dealt. We each have some level of inborn agency; reasons are not excuses, and none of us can forever escape sitting with the reality of our actions.
As Nietzsche said, “Freedom is the will to be responsible to ourselves.” To ourselves and each other, and to the truth of all that is changed in the practice of being alive. No small weight, that.
But before any of us get to fully explore all that potential for freedom (and all its inherent responsibility), we first have to be able to sit with the totality of life, not as we wished it was, but exactly as we have lived it. All that has been done to us, all we have lived through, the hell we have absorbed (and the beauty and perfection and bliss, too—it’s so very easy to forget about that).
If you’re like most people, you’ve twisted yourself into a million pretzels and performed a thousand Houdini escapes just to avoid staying in the same small room with the reality of your singular, inescapable life.
So, let me block your escape route, just for today. Let’s agree to untwist ourselves from all those contortions. Sit with me now and hear what I have to say:
The things that happened to you changed you.
People have hurt you. Humans who loved you. Who looked like you. Who were charged with your protection. People who expressed their love and vowed their commitment. Those who were granted access to your life and offered a pure and wondrous sort of trust only to break it. People who should have made your life easier or brighter or better or kinder.
And they didn’t. At all.
That doesn’t mean they are Terrible-Horrible-No-Good-Very-Bad people. They have mostly been ordinary, trying their best, not good and not bad humans, doing Very Good and Very Bad Things, just like you and me.
None of us is solely the best or worst of ourselves. We are all our kindest moments and our darkest hours. We are the deepest shame and the proudest accomplishment. Shadows can never exist without light.
~ excerpt from the essay redemption song
(©Jeanette LeBlanc - 2012)
Some of them had truly ill intentions. Many may have been ill-equipped to offer the care required. But through their action (or their lack of action), you were altered in ways that made your own body and brain a less kind and safe place to live. That made you less safe in the world. And that made the world, in turn, less safe with you.
You did not get to become the girl you would have been if your brother had not been hit by that car on that otherwise ordinary day. If he had not been in a six-month coma and forever after frozen, a seven-year-old mind in a growing manbody, with you as his inadvertent keeper.
You never got to meet the girl you would have grown into if your mother had not become a vehicle of rage-grief-brokenheart. The one who let her helplessness explode on your young body, leaving you to fend for yourself when you most needed care, because she was barely holding on.
You never got to expand into the woman you would have been if that man had not taken your body in violence as if you were an object owed him simply for existing.
You never got to know the human you would have grown into if your father had not been an addict who, because of all his own Terrible-Horrible-No-Good-Very-Bad-Things, wasn’t able to parent you the way you needed when he was alive, and who died well before he should have.
And you get to grieve each one of those girls. You get to miss them and long for them. You get to be so fucking mad at the universe that you didn’t get to know all the versions of you who might have been if only the world had been gentler or kinder or a little less random in its chaos and violence. If only there were not quite so much Terrible-Horrible-No-Good-Very-Badness. And you get to howl a holy primal rage that this world didn’t get to know those girls, too.
That rage? It is a valid place to visit and an awfully easy place to reside.
Because it’s not fair.
It’s not fucking fair that the versions of you that those girls may have become had to die simply because they were living a life that was so wildly out of their control.
It’s not fair, and it’s entirely fucked, and there’s not a damn thing you, or I, or anyone else can do to resurrect those long-gone-never-really-had-a-chance girls.
And that, love, is absolutely and irrefutably Terrible. And Horrible. And No Good. And Very, Very, Very Bad.
That truth is so much more than grief-worthy. It’s a bring-you-to-your-knees tragedy and worth every last ounce of anger and mourning you want to throw at it.
It can’t be undone. The story of your life thus far cannot be rewritten or erased or time travel magic-ed away. But freedom IS what you do with what’s been done to you AND the will to be responsible to yourself. And the story that is yet to come is infinite, bendable, an empty book waiting to be written by the hand of the incredibly strong, deeply loving, and wholly human woman you have become.
Right now, you stand at the starting line of a brand-new path to freedom. It’s a path of unknown duration and complexity that stretches before you off into the distance, with very little visible from your current position. It will be arduous and beautiful, and you will cycle through the stages of the hero’s journey more times than you can imagine. You will be tested, and you will meet yourself anew over and over again.
And that, love, is crazy intimidating and scary and probably often feels enough to freeze you, deer in headlights, while the world moves around you in high-speed motion.
“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”
Cheryl Strayed
But here’s what I believe to be true about the path you are on, which is the path of freedom and response-ability and which will ask you to sit in a lot of very small, quiet rooms and finally unescape yourself into an unavoidable reality.
If you keep your compass close and stay steady enough with the path ahead, you’ll find each of those girls somewhere along that road, the ones who made it to form the right-now-you and the ones who never had a chance to become.
When you do, you’ll get to stop your journey for a bit and invite them all to join you. One by one, your caravan of healing will grow until every you at every age who has ever been is walking in tandem. Maybe you can keep each other company on the path, ask really deep questions, and drop the facade.
Maybe once you’re far enough along that it feels safe to rest for a bit, you’ll build a fire in the desert alongside the path in the shadow of a 250-year-old saguaro that has seen it all and will tell no secrets. You’ll burn grandmother creosote to clear the air and invite all those yous—11-year-old you, and 15-year-old you, and 27-year-old you and 35-year-old you—to roast s’mores and shoot the shit for a bit.
You’ll watch the sky fade from blue to ink to bruise; the Milky Way will appear above and point out the North Star. And you will have a balls-to-the-wall-come-to-jesus talk with all those yous, and you’ll tell the whole unflinching truth of all the Terrible-Horrible-No-Good-Very-Bad-Things.
They will take turns telling you, in their own ways, who they all dreamed of becoming, and you’ll tell them the hard, raw truth of what you really became—the good and bad and the beautiful and ugly of every last bit.
They will listen. And you’ll all probably cry. Everyone will be interrupting and talking over each other. It might be hard to hear the youngest and quietest yous, so you’ll have to ensure they get their turn; they will need it most of all. No doubt, this will hollow you out, scrape out the detritus, and leave you ragged. But it will be worth it.
It will be worth it because you’ll finally get to tell them each in turn how hard you fought them, how you came out swinging and kept on swinging and never stopped swinging even when it hurt. You’ll tell them that there has been so much collateral damage that it weighs on your heart every moment of the day. You’ll beg for their forgiveness, and they will probably look at you blankly, not getting why you’d need to do penance because all they can see is that you’re the only one who made it here.
Do you hear me, love? You’re the only one who made it here.
And what’s more, you’re the only one who could have.
“Forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past”
~Buddy Wakefield
Maybe they’ll tell you they’ve been worried all this time that you’d be angry at them for not making it, thinking they should have fought harder or tried for longer. And then they will share that they’ve been cheering you along all this time, placing bets on how long it would take you to make it here to collect them all again. Because god damn, didn’t they all know that you eventually would.
You’ll look at each one of them in turn, your heart overflowing with love and compassion, incredulous and awe-filled. How did you get it so very wrong all this time?
Maybe you’ll all look at each other across that campfire and realize that all these years, every last version of you has been somehow ashamed and longing for absolution. Thinking they could-have-should-have-would-have done more.
Blaming themselves for all of their own Terrible-Horrible-No-Good-Very-Bad shame.
You’ll show them your scars then, the ones you got surviving it all. And they’ll show you theirs. Somehow, you’ll be surprised to see that they are the same.
“I’m sorry”, you’ll say again. “So very sorry”. And they will shake their heads, surprised that although you are the oldest, there is so much you do not yet understand.
They will tell you these scars are not fault lines. That you’re not made of unstable plates waiting to slip-slide into the nothingness. Not the precursor to a disaster zone. Not the Titanic going down in the frigid North Atlantic. No need for hazard lights or warning signs.
They tell you to see those shared scars as threads of connection. Trace them with your fingertips, and remember that scars only form on the ones who make it. They tell us that if you look right, every last one of those scars creates the map that will guide you home, but you’ve got to learn to see yourself through kind and generous eyes for the map to appear.
“I ask you right here, please, to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because, take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means I survived.”
~ Chris Cleave, Little Bee
And then maybe, just maybe, you’ll finally get it. There was never any more that could have been done than what you did. History cannot be rewritten; there is only what happened and the finite, grieveable, miraculous truth of that. It has taken you this long to finally begin to understand that all the versions of you—with all that was done to them and all they did in return—have been biding their time and holding what they could so you’d finally have a chance at getting free.
You’ll look at all those yous, then, and tell them what you only just realized. You never stopped looking for them, never stopped carving a safe space inside you for each of them. Never stopped silently promising to find them a better way, a safer path, a gentler existence. You’ll tell them that you fought so damn hard for so damn long that you forgot how to recognize peace when it appeared. That right now, you’re throwing every ounce of strength you have at learning to lay down your weapons and granting every last one of your yous the ceasefire you’ve all been praying for.
You’ll tell them you got so good at traveling forward and pushing ahead that it took you a minute to finally figure out the trick of doubling back to find them without losing your place. You’ll ask if maybe they are ready to let go of what might have been so that together you can all explore what just might be.
I feel like they’ll want to talk amongst themselves for a minute since this has been a lot to take in, so you’ll step away, just out of earshot. You’ll raise your face to the moon and feel the hard ground under your feet. You’ll realize that you are more present in your body and life than you’ve ever been. That though you are weary and lonely and the road ahead is long, you’re ready.
You, dearheart, are finally ready for what comes next. All the good and all the hard, the Terrible-Horrible-No-Good-Very-Bad, and the beautiful, too. Finally, you believe that it will be beautiful.
That’s when you’ll notice that things are suddenly quieter. The stones around the fire are empty, and the flames have died down. 11-year-old you, 15-year-old you, 27-year-old you, and 35-year-old you and all the rest of your yous are nowhere to be seen. The night is dark and clear and cold. You are once again alone.
For a second, you’ll feel panic and grief and the rising of that old, familiar, hopeless rage. But then you’ll get it, slowly and then all at once.
They are not gone, have never been missing, never were lost. They didn’t die; they hid, rested, watched, learned, and waited. They protected you, took the hits, took the falls, and did what they could to keep you safe. And you did the same for them.
They are all with you; they always have been. They just needed to wait for an invitation to make themselves known.
They needed you to love them enough to grant them safe passage.
They needed you to love yourself enough to set them all free.
Enough to finally save all of you, every last one.
Oh wow. This. I am in love with this piece. It cracked my heart way open.
Absolutely so beautiful and truly relatable for my story. I hope to one day apologize to all the younger girls of my past that I feel as if I have let down one way or another. Thank you for this piece, truly felt seen and a little less Alone in this lonely world.