I Love a Villain

An acquaintance of mine in college was headed toward a career in specialty medicine, and as someone (then) on a similar path, I admired her drive — late nights in the library, skipping social events to study — so I asked her where that drive came from. Her answer was unexpected: a high school ex-boyfriend had told her she wasn’t smart enough to be a doctor. This insult sparked a determination that fueled her through twelve years of higher education and into a prestigious career, but it always made me a bit sad. Surely there was a better reason to go into medicine than revenge? Then, while on a run one day, I was wrapping up an internal shouting match with a virtual nemesis and realized the last few miles had flown by without my awareness. I had to admit my own tendency toward anger-fueled activities. Turns out my best runs are defined by more than just a good playlist.

I love a villain. Picking the bad guy out of a lineup — whether it’s on social media, within celebrity feuds, or around the holiday dinner table — has provided me way too much motivation and comfort over the years. Anger can be more invigorating than endorphins, more comforting than a warm blanket. This, I’ve come to understand, is not a most sustainable, grace-filled way to live. Obviously, it’s not very overtly “Christian” to be walking around kicking puppies. Not to mention that nursing anger blocks not only forgiveness, but the sadness underneath the anger, which is itself a conduit for grace and healing that often goes avoided (yes, this is your reminder to see your therapist if you have one. Even if his name is Jesus).

In the series Shrinking, the main characters have a huge offense to forgive: the killing of their wife and mother by a drunk driver. My own opportunities to extend forgiveness are decidedly (and thankfully) more prosaic and quotidian: think cabinet doors left open or butting heads on social media. But impending villainy is common across offenses. When Brian tells Liz, “Sometimes the idea of forgiving someone seems impossible. Then you realize the villain in your story is just a person who made a big mistake” — reader, I felt attacked. And seen. Attacked, because I have readily handed out the villain label for a Viking-sized range of mistakes, and seen, because grace has been doing its work to show me that these villains — these people — and their mistakes are the product of their own imperfect stories. Just like me. (But often with less therapy. And/or Jesus. Just saying.)

When discussing the premise of Shrinking, creator Bill Lawrence has said that the first season was about grief and the second, forgiveness. Lately, I’ve been learning how the two are inextricably tied. If, like Vision said, grief is love persevering, then forgiveness can be a response to that love being wounded. When we are hurt in a way that forces us to confront the space between love and love lost, or between a person we love and who we thought they were, this confrontation constitutes its own form of grief, which is why true forgiveness is not a switch we flip or a single decision we make: it is a liminal space of tension in which we choose to reside as we come to terms with the singular kind of disappointment that occurs when people let us down and cause us grief.

My older son, who has faced his share of discrimination and misunderstanding due to his neurotype, is working through a phase — I believe it’s called being a teenager, and some people never emerge from it (took me until about last year) — in which he’s discovered that anger feels remarkably similar to power. I can see, in his quickness to choose outrage, shades of myself throughout my life. I can also see, like I couldn’t then, the sadness beneath that outrage. And that sadness? It deserves attending to. That sadness is, so often, where Jesus hangs out and waits for us. Like a bench at a train station.

And after the waning of villainy, what then? Will I run as fast? Would my friend have become a doctor? Do we lose our power when we lose our villains? My unspoken fear has always been what, if anything, will fill the space that the villain leaves, and if it will feel as good as hating that villain. In other words, how forgiveness plays out.

I’m starting to think that forgiveness looks a lot like letting go, which is not exactly a power stance but certainly is a freedom one. For some, that looks like sitting on a bench next to the man who accidentally killed your wife. For others, it may look like polite conversations around the holiday table and a relationship reduced to small talk (which is its own form of death, if you ask me). I suspect that for most of us, it will reside more in the small daily movements that accompany a grace-visited life, which is to say more cross than glory. If it were an exercise in glory, we would think we had something to do with it. But if, like Anne Lamott writes, “Forgiveness is God’s love on steroids,” then like his love, forgiveness is divinely sourced and harvested. Less control and power, and more relief: the relief of trusting the outcome to the working of a grace that has never yet failed to show up in my own life. Trusting that another person’s response to grace, and grief, if they are willing to face them, is between them and God. Realizing that just as I am a product of my own imperfect story and its experience with grace, so are they, and both of us will rely on the comfort of a villain until we recognize we have an Advocate whose voice rings louder than internal arguments or even playlists.