We are the good and we are the bad. We are the best and we are the worst. We are the most kind and we are the most unkind, the most selfless and the most selfish, and all of it at once, in the same person, with none of it cancelling out any of the rest.
For anybody who has built a life around morals, ethics, integrity and high standards, this is the hardest thing there is to accept. It is far harder than any external difficulty, and none of them come close. Because a choice has to be made between accepting the whole of it or keeping a comfortable half in order to protect something that took thirty years to build.
It is not a comfortable thing to write down and there is good reason to hesitate over it. It is written down because pretending otherwise is exactly what takes twenty years, and nobody should spend another twenty in the same room.
What happens to praise
When a compliment arrives after that, telling somebody they are the best at something, or the kindest, or the most principled person anybody knows, it does not make them happy. Not because they are modest, which would be its own kind of performance. Because in that exact moment they are also aware of being the worst, and the person speaking is not aware of it, and so what is being praised is a half.
This is not false humility, which is simply vanity turned inside out and is usually obvious to everybody in the room. It is that the sentence no longer fits anything real. They are describing a person who exists, but only as one half of a person who also exists, and the description cannot be accepted on behalf of somebody known to be incomplete.
The same happens to blame, which is the part nobody expects and which turns out to be the gift in all of this. When something bad comes through us, there is no longer a collapse under it. Neither the good is ours nor the bad. Neither the success nor the failure. Nobody built the whole of what they are, and taking full credit for one half would mean taking full credit for the other, and neither can be carried.
Why the half is protected
The half is protected because a great deal rests on it. Reputation, certainly, and that matters more than people admit. But mostly it is the ability to keep functioning, because a person who is good is entitled to act, and a person who has just discovered how much of the other thing is in them is no longer sure that they are.
There is also the ego, which needs a settled account and will not tolerate an open one. It wants a verdict. It can work perfectly well with saint and it can even work with sinner, because both of those are stable positions from which a life can be organised and defended. What it cannot work with is both at once with no resolution.
So a half gets chosen. And choosing means keeping half of oneself permanently outside the room, and everything kept outside a room does what such things do, which is to come in through the window at the least convenient moment. It never simply waits quietly where it was put.
What is actually gained
What is gained is not peace exactly, and calling it self-love would be dishonest, since that is a phrase almost nobody can say without flinching. It is something plainer than either. A person stops being surprised by themselves.
When something unworthy appears now, there is no crisis and no long night afterwards, because it is not new information. It has been in the account all along and this is simply a reminder of a balance already known. That is a considerable saving of energy over a year.
And the need for other people to hold a particular view goes with it. Their view was always going to be a half, whichever half they happened to pick, and no amount of careful management was ever going to make it accurate. That releases an enormous quantity of effort that was going into a task that could not be completed. We are everything and we are nothing. Nobody fully understands that sentence and nobody has stopped finding it true.
