There's no feeling quite like that loose-limbed, frozen-tongued limbo that is to be vilified.
To face your own villainy is one excursion of the searching soul - a journey I've made and back again. Not for the last time either.
Your villainy is that reflection of yourself - the one that grimaces at the sight of you and sneers at your aspirations. Your villainy holds you hostage and ties your better self to railway tracks while an untuned piano plinks and plonks from the outset. Your villainy has a twizzly moustache and a phantom-like cape, draping over one arm like a bat's wing.
And yet it is only once we face down that villainy do we realise it for the caricature it truly is. It's an exaggeration of all our fears and confusion with leering eyes and a goatee to boot.
And then you find that part of yourself at peace. A fitful, hero-worthy peace.
And then, if you're unfortunate enough - upheaval.
Because even once you've contended with your own villain of sorts, you find yourself caught in the crosshairs of someone else's. And I mean proper "deer-in-the-headlights" caught because this shit catches you thoroughly off guard.
To be vilified. To be accused with utmost certainty that you have committed an act most heinous. To be vilified is to become the bad guy in someone else's story of their fiction. To be unequivocally divested of all your trusts and respects in an instant.
And this is where you stand, dumbfounded. Because you are clean - as pure as the driven snow clean. You're caught with bloodied hands that haven't a trace of red upon them. And despite your protestations, the villainy remains.
Congratulations, you've not died the good guy but you've lived long enough to become the bad guy (Thanks Dent).
Someone else's cape swathed; narrow-eyed; twizzly-moustachio'd nemesis has concocted the perfect plan and made sure that you, good sir or madam, have become the fall person.
You thought you were home free - that you'd cleared your round and could skip to the finish line! And then this fiendish curr comes out of someone else's nowhere and becomes your problem all over again.
Life is not easy. Let me paraphrase Picard: It is possible to make absolutely no mistakes and still fail. This is not weakness - this is life.
