In life, there are no heroes and no villains. I dislike dramas and movies because, in stories, there is just one fixed villain or more than one villain, and there is one fixed hero or more than one hero, and they remain just villains and heroes for the rest of their lives until the writer bothers with a redemption arc. Life is not this black and white.
Life comes in greys. I have always said this. In life, there are no heroes and no villains, just ordinary people mishandling other people. There are people mishandling their potential to be human.
There are people who will be villains in some stories and will be human and heroes in other stories. And there will be heroes who will mess up humanity and be even worse than villains, either for themselves or for someone else. So, in life, there are only grey people. And I want the world to see itself in this grey color.
Because we either label someone as a villain and hate them devotedly, or we label people as heroes and expect all the impossible things from them as if they cannot mishandle us. It’s not people’s job to properly handle us. It’s them trying to navigate through life in their own ways, which can make them good or bad.
Perhaps this is why I find it exhausting to place my faith in the illusion of heroes or despise the idea of villains with unwavering certainty.
People are not statues carved into roles; they are rivers, ever-changing, shaped by the landscapes they flow through. People, like rivers, do not remain the same. They shift, bend, and break under the forces that shape them.
Some go through meandering—gradual, quiet changes, their course altering over time through the erosion of old beliefs and the deposition of new experiences. Others face avulsion—abrupt, violent shifts that carve a new path in an instant, often leaving behind traces of who they once were.
Life wears people down like water against stone, sculpting them through trauma, fights, and struggles, reshaping them in ways even they don’t always understand. Life shapes the fluvial dynamics of experiences, eroding some, depositing others, and continuously altering their course.
And yet, just as a river never truly stops flowing, people continue forward, adapting to the terrain set before them. No one emerges from life untouched. We are all products of the landscapes we have passed through, carrying within us the remnants of every storm, every flood, and every quiet, steady current that has altered our course.
A villain in one story may have been a child once, dreaming of goodness before life twisted their path. A hero, celebrated and worshipped, may have buried their own sins beneath the weight of their victories.
We all carry shades of grey, slipping between roles we never signed up for. And maybe, just maybe, if we stopped painting people into rigid archetypes, we would finally learn to see them as they are—flawed, unpredictable, and painfully human.
— Sadia Hakim // Sciopoetica Series
