[NOT A STORY]
In the past year, I've stayed home most of the time due to the pandemic. Although being locked in can be depressing, I decided to use the extra time to reflect on my journey as a human being. I've jotted down a few pages of the "lesson...
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"From your side of the story, the other person is always the villain."
As a writer, I often set up an antagonist character by intention when developing the story. Although unnecessarily, in some cases the antagonists are evil - they have the opposite characters and manners of the protagonists. The good news is, no matter how evil an antagonist in my story can be, he or she is fictional.
I notice that I also tend to antagonise real people in real life. In my family, we consider my cousin V as the true villain. V lives with my Uncle A, and since he was a kid, Uncle A always pampers him with everything, from money to smartphones, game consoles, clothing and shoes. And V knows that he can always get everything from Uncle A because the uncle is rich. Fun fact: Uncle A is not V's biological father. Uncle A and V's mother are siblings, just like my mother to him.It was quite a different situation for the other cousins. Uncle A is generous, but he treated V differently from the rest of us.
I used to live in Uncle A's house, and the treatments were so black and white. V lost his phone every two months, but instead of getting scolded, he always got a new replacement - mostly the latest one. I lived under the same roof for 8 years, and Uncle A only gave me a new phone 2 times. V owns the TV in the living room for playing games - he could play games for 6 hours straight. I rarely watched TV because every time I complained, Uncle A ignored me. V got two dedicated cabinets for his shoe collection. My shoes and sandals were put out on the veranda. His room was air-conditioned. My room was fanned. Every time we went shopping, V could lay his fingers on literally anything and Uncle A would buy it for them. As for me, I was only the porter.
The contrast was so vivid, my mother protested to Uncle A. "You have to treat your nephews and nieces fairly," she said. "You couldn't give everything for one and left nothing for the others."Such "unfairness" caused the other cousins to see V as Uncle A's golden nephew. We disliked V so much to the point that we laughed in total satisfaction every time something bad happened to him. From our side of the story, V was the bad guy.
When I left Uncle A's house and returned to my parents, finally I realised that V has a different life from the rest of us. He lived quite a tragic life. His father abandoned him since he was in 1st grade and only sees him ONCE a year, during Christmas. His mother went to work overseas and remarried a foreigner who doesn't care at all about V. None of them give V money. They simply dumped him in Uncle A's house. This "villain" that we hated, grew up without love.
Uncle A tried to replace V's parents by looking after him. His method might seem too "extravagant", but as a childless man, I believed Uncle A tried his best. My uncle might feel that he didn't have to pamper the other cousins so much because we have our parents who cared for us.
As for V, what he wanted was parental figures who could love and guide him. Uncle A saw that, but I didn't. To me, V was this greedy, arrogant boy who could get anything he wanted. To V, I was a cousin with loving parents - something that he doesn't have - and always envy him.
There are always two sides to a story. We can be a hero on our side, but the villain on the other's side.
