8. A mirror that reflects the sun

I am fool for thinking I can ever stop running. and they are a fool for waiting at the finish line. The mirror’s brilliance deceives both itself and others into believing that reflection equals illumination.

Something I’ve thought about heavily recently is the concept of good and evil. What makes a person a good being and one a bad being. In philosophy, there are several ethical frameworks that outline what it is that makes a being good – for example, in virtue ethics states that a good person is one who develops virtues that strive towards moral excellence. In Utilitarianism a good person promotes the greatest happiness for the greatest number. In existentialist ethics, goodness in a person is found through creating value in our choices, living authentically and taking responsibility for the meanings, we create. And then we have the religious views of what it is to be a good person – someone who embodies love, compassion, humility and alignment with the divine or moral truth; being a good person often means transcending ego, acting selflessly and producing harmony with others.

A view that has stuck with me the most, and the one I seem to question is the deontological ethic, Immanuel Kants Moral Philosophy. He states that the morality of an action depends on the intention behind it, not on the consequences it produces – for Kant, a person is good when they act from duty, meaning they do what is right because it is right, not because it brings pleasure, success or approval.

“Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world… which can be called good without qualification, except a good will.” — Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)

A simple example of this would be telling the truth even though it can cause trouble, but you do it anyways because honesty is the right thing to do. Even if the result is unpleasant, your intention was moral, therefore making you morally good.

 But does having good intentions really make you a good person if those good intentions produce suffering in others? What if those good intentions seem good to the individual carrying them but doesn’t make sense to everyone else around them? Do you still remain a good person then?

It is comforting to believe that good intentions make us good individuals, after all if someone means well, how can their actions be wrong. But I beg to differ and believe it is more complicated – good intentions can coexist with behaviour that causes real harm, whether it is physical harm or emotional and mental harm. A person’s motive may be pure, but when fear, ego or even emotional unavailability is present and blinding to the impact of their choices, perhaps that’s when their ‘goodness’ becomes questionable.

I’ve been thinking about this from an avoidant perspective. As someone who has avoidant attachment tendencies woven deep into their soul being, I have questioned myself on several occasions whether or not I am in fact a good person.  See, avoidant attachment is not just about a relationship style – it is a lens through which the world is perceived, a filter through which we interpret love and connection. At its core it is a defence mechanism, an attempt to protect ourselves from the vulnerabilities of emotional closeness. It can begin early, often as an outcome response to early experiences that were too overwhelming, too unpredictable, or too painful. It is a learned behaviour – something picked up along the way, sometimes without even realizing it was picked up.

When it comes to connection and love, whether platonic or romantic, it can feel like a heavy burden, an anchor that tugs too forcefully at the soul. And most cases this is where people think that we are people who are heartless, people who never cared to begin with, when that’s not the case – it is not that we don’t long for love, it is that we have internalized the belief that love demands something we can’t afford to give. We have learned to be hyper-independent, to guard emotions and to avoid leaning too heavily on others – so when this balance is disrupted, we instantly get pulled under and feel a sense of suffocation, of entrapment.

Yet this need for emotional distance, this urge to protect ourselves from the vulnerability that love demands, often backfires. Because the very thing we push away is the thing that could possibly heal us, the very thing that can fill the emptiness we carry. We long for it, but we don’t know how to accept it without feeling overwhelmed, consumed or trapped.

And here is where the paradox comes forward – we want connection, we yearn for the kind of love and connection that is deep and lasting, the kind that provides comfort safety and understanding. But the second it is within our reach; we push it away. We sabotage relationships with people, sometimes aware, sometimes unaware, we pull back when things get too close, when someone tries to love us in a way that feels too demanding, too dependent, too personal. We become distant and cold – retreating into ourselves to preserve the sense of autonomy and independence we’ve spent so long cultivating.

Truth is, it’s not that we don’t feel love, or that we never loved a person: it is simply that we don’t know how to manage it. The emotions that come with love feel too big, too intense, too overwhelming that they don’t nearly fit into the walls we’ve built around ourselves. So, in return we detach before it implodes, we build walls higher and higher, each brick adding another layer of protection.

Now back to the main point, as an avoidant, I tend to question if my ‘good intentions’ even make me a good person at all. Because even though I am aware of my avoidance, and that when it is triggered, I tend to push away not only for myself but because I know for a fact that the person involved will not receive what love asks from me. I am aware that because of my avoidant nature, I cannot give a person what they deserve, that is why I go into fight or flight and retreat. I used to tell myself that by detaching sooner rather than later, I am doing a good thing by protecting the other person from future heartbreak or from future withdrawals, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more I question if as an avoidant, even with right intentions, I can even be what is morally classed as a good person.

Even though we care and truly love, avoidance often manifests as withdrawal, emotional distance or a refusal to connect deeply and the people who loves us most, become the ones who feel the brunt of this. To someone who just simply wants to love the avoidant, it can often feel like a punishment, a rejection.

I will admit I have hurt people because of my avoidant nature; I’ve lost genuine relationships over distance and withdrawal all because I didn’t know how to sit with closeness. I’ve made people feel like they should apologise for their desire to be close, for just wanting to love me, when truth is, they should never have to apologise for such a thing – the work is mutual, they should be able to understand an avoidants fear, and the avoidants need to stop making those who love them the most pay for it.

Love bombing can emerge from avoidant roots also, not in the same way as narcissistic abuse, but I will be honest I have had moments where I’ve also questioned if I’m really just a narcissist hiding behind an avoidant attachment style, not because it is the truth, I have been told professionally I am not, but simply because sometimes I feels like the damage I cause to others feels like the equivalent to what a narcissist would do. but love bombing for avoidants emerge as a panic response, sometimes we flood early intimacy with intensity, promises, poetic devotion – not because we are lying, but rather that in the moment, we want to truly believe we are safe. But as intimacy deepens, our nervous system gets flooded. The vulnerability becomes unbearable, so we vanish. Not because the connection and love weren’t real, but because it became too real, too quickly.

This push-pull dynamic isn’t romantic nor healthy, for any form of relationship – it is destabilising, it erodes trust and if it is left unaware, it creates people to feel as though love should be earned, that safety is always temporary; that emotional warmth always comes with a cold front. The avoidants intention – to prevent harm – ironically becomes the very thing that causes it. In the good intention of trying to distance away in aim to create space for someone to get something better, something they truly deserve, we hurt them with suffering of neglect, lack of trust and betrayal – we make them feel punished for just simply trying to love.

My avoidance, in most cases, proves to me how maybe I am not as much of a good person as I intend to be, even with my good intentions of attempting to prevent harm, I cause harm in other areas unintentionally – Hurt people hurt people, and I am a solid example of it. The way my mind decides to handle certain things in certain moments- it tends to forget that I’m not the only being on earth with feelings that need to be protected. Maybe I was doing the wrong things but with the right intentions, but even then, how is the person who falls victim to this supposed to know your intentions when your actions say otherwise.

A person with good intentions but avoidant behaviour is like a mirror that reflects the sun yet never gives warmth. Their moral glow is only a reflection — an image of goodness rather than its living presence. They wish others well, speak kindly, and even recognize what is right, but their virtue remains inert – They mean well — they want to bring light, to be kind, to do no harm — but they stand always at a distance, untouched by the fire that gives life its warmth. True goodness demands more than right thinking; it asks for engagement, for the willingness to act even when it costs comfort or safety. The mirror’s brilliance deceives both itself and others into believing that reflection equals illumination. Yet genuine moral worth, like the sun’s light, lies not in the appearance of virtue but in the capacity to warm, to nurture, and to transform what it touches.

Even though saying certain goodbyes doesn’t make me a bad person, I am not a good one either because I could’ve given kinder goodbyes, especially to those who were genuine. Even though letting go of certain relationships doesn’t make me a bad person, I am not a good person either because I allowed distance and silence to paint the conclusions that could’ve been made with communication. I am not a good person because I gave hope to people, promises I knew from the beginning I couldn’t keep – because in the desperate attempts of trying to heal and protect myself from this world, I fall and become the opposite of my ‘good intentions’. I don’t regret meeting people, I regret making them believe there is something to expect from me, when there isn’t. Maybe, within their hope for me, sparks a hope in me, and that’s what causes me to allow people in, even when I know the hard truth.  And the cost of it all is that we lose connections that could’ve still stayed if we had just sat a second longer rather than retreating, but most importantly, we emotionally damage people who didn’t deserve it.

A lesson I learnt this year is that a person’s capacity for growth is directly linked to how much truth they can face about themselves without running away. As much as we try running away, I think the presence of self-awareness and our actions, independent from our internal intentions, is what brings out the truth, it makes you realise things you didn’t even think of within the moment, whether those things are good or bad.

So perhaps, good intentions in fact does not make someone a good person, as goodness is not measured by internal motives alone, but by the effects of our actions also. But perhaps also, what defines a good person is the willingness to grow beyond intention, to face the discomfort of one’s own flaws, and to choose action that aligns care with accountability – that guilt we feel clarifies the want for change. It won’t undo anything that has already been done and set, as no amount of apologizing, no amount of remorse or regret can take back what’s already been set and let go of but – if there is guilt then there is awareness, and with that comes growth.

– and with that I aim to do things differently, to become a good person.