Do you know what it’s like to not love yourself? To always have an alternate truth floating around in your head? Do you know?

I know. I know what it’s like to see a fat person every time I look in the mirror. Even though there’s been so many pounds lost; even though there’s a line (a literal line) of men at my door. I still see a fat unattractive excuse for a women. I fake confidence because logic tells me I’m beautiful but it’s not what I see. I know what it’s like to not have friends. To always feel like someone has an ulterior motive. Never trusting people for who they are or what they give you. I know what it’s like to feel like the person you love is only biding time before that concert or that trip you have planned. Just being nice enough that you hold on. Are they jerks; is he an ass - no. But that’s where my mind takes me. That’s what happens when the staple people in your childhood betray you. When you never learn as a child what it’s like to be loved and how to love yourself. You end up this broken shell of a human. Second guessing everything. Pushing through therapy because you know better. I sure as hell can fake it. I have to; I’m not allowed to be sad - I’m the pretty girl with all the friends.

Evil is the counterpoint of Life. Philosophers have defined it as the "absence of Good."

To me it is the Cruel... I see it as very small by contrast to the infinitely surrounding life-force. Small, yet fatally potent, trapped inside of us humans— trapped inside of us alone.

It's a flash, an involuntary reflex (not necessarily acted on). One which creeps out of hiding like a morbid arachnid from the deepest recesses of our primordial mind. The impulse to harm or wrong, ourselves or another. I'm sure you've seen it, felt it, clocked it, checked it, swept it beneath the tufts of your hair. There it remains: vile, corrupting. That thing that cannot be retracted, because unlike the evening news fed by talking heads, our own imaginings cannot be redacted. The self— sabotaged by ideas vile and terminal—

cannot but wonder with fear whether such escaped thoughts have scampered across our very facial features, and left a shadow! no, a trail, or worse a McBethian stain! These are thoughts not fully expressed, nor even genuinely felt, they're just latently there... surfacing, and perceived almost as if already committed (hate, spite, envy, intolerance, etc.). The more sensitive the individual, the more vivid the nightmare. A sinful familial treachery, contrasting the best and the worst, of our humanity.

The Negative lurks in the back of the mind, waiting as if for our delicate scales to tip. Will we slip off the edge... into what we viscerally feel is wrong, insane, unjustifiable? We offer help to an outstretched hand, but then at times spontaneously our internal mental spool runs an image of horror and animosity... as if to spit at that hand, or slash it off... ideas completely foreign, unwelcomed, uninvited... causing us to recoil from our own wretched selves... curb our inexplicable anger, impatience, greed... that seed of Evil.

Having not acted on these impulses, we want to defend that we are Good in the balance.... Yet all that we can really offer is our belief that it is so. And Belief, even in our own minds, is a poor ally; it always saves room for Doubt. Hence we feel, by in large, ill at ease. We call into question whether we are really "free," or merely "complete" in fullness of our potential—for Good or for Evil—which notabley, is the first definition of "perfect." (Not ideal; merely whole.) Someone once asked me, "do you think you could ever do something really horrific? Like murder, torture, etc.?!" And desperately wanting to shout No! instead I heard myself reply: "One never knows when one will snap..."

#WhatIsEvilchallenge