Bad Faith

good girls, negative ecstasy, and leaving

Raised a pastor's daughter in southeast Texas, I was bred to be good. I recited every verse, knew every answer, and believed it with everything I had. Something burned deep in my gut when the Sunday School teacher talked about God's eye roving through the earth, looking for one righteous person. I would be it.

To be bad meant to sin. It meant rejecting what I'd been taught. It meant turning away from everything I knew and becoming like the people I was warned about. It meant possibly losing my family and the only community I had known.

I would never be bad. Until I was.

* * *

Jean-Paul Sartre spoke of the concept of "mauvaise foi" or bad faith. It's a form of self-deception in which people act inauthentically, denying their freedom and avoiding their true selves. They lie to themselves to prevent short-term pain while bearing the burden of long-term psychological consequences.

* * *

I lived in bad faith when I married a boy I shouldn't have, just a teenager myself. We were in love, I told myself, though truly, I knew we weren't. I was too afraid to turn back. I had already come so far.

Shortly into our marriage, I had a nervous breakdown, and it became very clear I was being abused. I couldn't afford to hide it. But he hadn't hit me. And he hadn't cheated on me, the two reasons the church would accept as grounds for divorce.

In the same way I asked if I could go to a sleepover, I asked if I could get a divorce.

"It's grounds for separation but not for divorce," was the church's official stance.

For a moment, it felt like someone sucked up all the air from the universe, just like when I was seven and skipped three rungs on the monkey bars. My diaphragm crashed on the ground. 

* * *

Simone de Beauvoir, the feminist scholar (who also happened to be Sartre's partner), building on Sartre's work, argued that women often fall into bad faith by accepting societal roles and limitations imposed upon them, rather than acknowledging their freedom to choose their own path.

Good girls can somehow be the most lost. Tangled in the web of what everyone else wants for them. When you've lived most of your life that way, finding out what you're living for can be confusing, if not terrifying.

* * *

Three years into my marriage, I found myself at the kitchen sink, plunging my hands into soapy water, channeling all my anxiety into scrubbing sippy cups and plates. I was avoiding the man I had already tried to leave twice. I was slowly rotting inside.

Standing at the sink, I remember thinking, "What's seventy more years of this?" I could put my head down and accept the consequences of my teenage mistake.

But I also felt my insides twisting, with a deep knowing that there had been another life where I was loved and safe. I simply had missed the chance.

Is this what it means to be good?

* * *

Sartre had a term for that terrifying recognition of our freedom. The "Oh shit, I could have actually been living a different life all along, and I still could change it, but it would wreck everything, so actually, nevermind." He called those 3 AM existential crises "negative ecstasy."

We realize we can change everything about our lives. We are freer than we ever imagined, but this freedom comes with a heavy price: the acknowledgment that we may have been wasting our lives all along. Or the terror of change. Or the fear of judgment or shame from others.

In these moments, we see clearly that we cannot blame others or our circumstances for our choices. The impetus to act, change, and become authentic rests squarely on our shoulders.

And sometimes, all we can do is panic and hide from it.

I saw clearly that I had choices—terrifying, liberating choices. But I also saw there would be consequences: social repercussions, gossip, punishment – a people-pleaser's nightmare.

So, instead of changing my circumstances, I closed my eyes to those choices, sinking back into the comfort of predetermined roles and expectations, avoiding repercussions and saving myself from immediate pain.

* * *

Part of the problem is societal—sometimes most of the problem. de Beauvoir wrote of oppression in her writings. She realized that circumstances were limiting factors and that philosophy could not magically cure society in one fell swoop.

de Beauvoir argues that we exist in a state of ambiguity, caught between our freedom to shape our future and the limitations imposed by our situation. To live authentically, we must embrace this ambiguity, recognizing both our capacity for choice and the constraints of our circumstances.

So many are too tired at the end of the day trying to pay their bills, they will go for years without ever getting the chance to ask themselves what it is they want.

So many are tangled up in the expectations put on them. They've spent so long sweating and hustling to meet and exceed them that they've never gotten to ask themselves who they're meeting them for.

So many are treated unfairly and told that they couldn't be accepted for the fullness of who they are. They know that if they live as their true selves, they may never be accepted by the people they love.

Acknowledging our freedom and living in it is rarely straightforward.

* * *

It took me finding my toddler alone one too many times for me to finally act. On my third attempt to leave, I was unsure for how long. Though I desperately wanted to be done, I was also not ready to face the loss of my community.

One night, I placed a distressed phone call to a friend. I paced the fields outside, the cicadas raging in unison as my friend calmly said, "Just make the choice. And stick with it. No one else can make it for you."

That was all I was waiting for, to know that at least one person would still accept me if I did the bad thing. At that moment, unceremoniously, I said the words I'd wanted to say for three years: "Okay. Well then, I'm done."

"Okay," she said.

"Okay," I said.

And that time, it was truly for good.

* * *

I wish I could say that I reached an enlightenment, that listening to myself once has cured me of a lifetime of bad faith, but that's just not how it works. 

A couple of years later, I found myself in a crisis of faith, leaving a religion I could no longer stand by. It happened gradually. My ethical qualms grew too great, the mounting excuses all disproven. I drifted to a place I didn't ever think I could go.

Although I'd already experienced one departure, it didn't lessen the fear or pain of a second. 

And years later, I still find myself grappling with these webs. It's like a slow detox, and every time I think I'm done, another situation emerges in which I find myself slipping back into the scripts others wrote, allowing shame or guilt to steer my path and no longer myself. Or when I get stuck believing that what I was is all I can be. Or when I worry it's too late. Or when I see that I am stuck and very much not free.

* * *

Sartre didn't write about bad faith from a place of superiority but an acknowledgment of how the human brain works. He knew that we would likely always need to remind ourselves of our freedom.

He knew we would over-identify ourselves with the jobs we have and the roles we play, so easily accepting our fates. But his concept of "being precedes essence" reminds us we are not simply what we were yesterday or what we always have been. 

We contain possibility. We always have the freedom to change, to morph, to evolve. We always are more. And we always are free. 

It's easier to fall back into familiar patterns than to embrace freedom. The challenge lies not just in recognizing our freedom in fleeting moments of negative ecstasy, but in holding onto that recognition, living with the weight of our responsibility day after day.

* * *

This is not a cautionary tale or a treatise on leaving. Sometimes, it is equally important to stay. It's just a little reminder to our human brains. My human brain. Maybe yours.

And a tiny gentle note to the good girls and boys:

We are more than our roles, more than our past, more than our present. We are the sum of our choices, our dreams, our fears, and our potential — always evolving, always becoming.

May we always remember our freedom. May we have the courage to tell ourselves the truth. May we all act in good faith, regardless of the path we choose to take. May we be kind to ourselves as we learn and grow. May we make room for our evolution. May we expand.

And at the end of our lives, may we not be haunted by the burden of the lives we were too afraid to live.

So what will we do with our freedom?