Curate, connect, and discover
Someone put it in words for me. THIS. I'm able to finally see the other side and I love that cause why would I want to believe that everyone just fucking hates me? I can finally see a possibility. Growing up, I had to learn when a classmates words were theirs vs. the adults around them. I learned to tell when classmates were forced to no longer be around me, and honestly, it felt better to hate their parents than to hate them. I took those words as someone's else's that so happened to come from the nice big kid in school. I know their nice. I've seen them, be it.
I relate to Billy a lot. Dealt with a lot of abuse and prejudice from my father. I wasn't able to fix my thought process until I left, and I know that it's possible in real life cause I've seen it. So why can't I make Billy do the same? I was friends with a dude for over eight years. His mother told him we couldn't be friends cause I was after his money. (He's gay and at the time, I was dating strictly femme). He listened to everything his mother said about me when she only met me for an hour. He started looking back on how she acted, and he deemed her unsafe for me to be around. We just had to wait for college to rekindle our friendship when she wasn't around and couldn't dictate him.
I went off track cause my brain started unlocking shit but I would much rather believe that my bullies like Billy were going through the same shit like me and just couldn't do anything til they got out. Until they got the help they needed. Some of now are fucking civil rights activists and they help counsel people who are struggling with bigotry. I have seen it happen in real life, so why can't this fictional character do the same in my head?
Y'know what's funny about people insisting you can't like Billy because there are real life people bullied by people like him?
I've been bullied by people like him.
I grew up black in a backwater town, dudes like him were fucking everywhere. To this day there's a set of twins that only I can tell apart reliably because I got in a fight with one and scarred his eyebrow. They both acted just like him, bullied me for the same shit he does in canon.
But you know what?? Viewing it through a fictional lense allows me to make a distance I couldn't with my real life bullies. I can take that step back and begin to empathize with him because this ISN'T real life. I can see the factors that are making him act like he does and it then helps me connect it back to those real life people. How many of them were hurting down deep? How many of them were scared kids on the wrong end of their Dad's belt? How many of them could have benefitted from someone taking the time to reach out?
And that is what fiction is SUPPOSED to do. Give you the distance to consider a perspective you might not be able to see in your day to day life. And I don't know about y’all but it makes healing a little bit easier for me when I consider that the person who hurt me might just have been a scared kid too.