By Bel Radford
Are bad people concerned by their own badness? Is guilt therefore what makes a person good? Philosophers have spent a great deal of time agonising over the anatomy of goodness in both character and behaviour, and I grew fond and heartily committed to this pastime at the age of fourteen when I became convinced I was an axe murderer. I had not, in fact, murdered anybody, but this did not help. I believed that on a conveyor belt deep within the body-packing district my soul was being assembled by some god, or maybe an angel, or transcendental mind-body sweatshop worker whose performance had lapsed in the assembly of me. My brain had naturally, therefore, been deployed squarely into the wrong body, a very bad body belonging to a very bad person. My mind was sure of this, connected to my new body via a kludgy workaround that surged with vague but assured notions that, unfortunately, I was indeed inhabiting a psychopath. As such, guilt was all I felt, and if guilt is indeed the measure of goodness, I, a 21-year-old pervert, killer, potential terrorist and anything else bad and ending in ‘ist’ appear to be Jesus. Regrettably, loyal disciples, your God is corrupt, and as such it is now her turn in the confession booth. Forgive me, me, for I have sinned!
Reddit (PhD), the black hole of any and every shameful bodily query bore the brunt of the majority of my mea culpa. Some very real searches spanning the past six years submitted as evidence:
(1st June 2024, 12:00am) Google: am I a bad person quiz
(1st June 2024, 12:02am) Google: am I a bad person quiz free
(22nd February 2023, 2:41am) Google: if I find a dog cute does that mean I’m attracted to it but I really don’t want to be
(19th October 2020, 3:18pm) Google: intrusive thought about hurting someone but I don’t mean it but because I thought it does it mean I secretly want to
(6th April 2026 8:26pm) Google: how likely is it for someone to plant your DNA at a crime scene
(9th May 2025 10:46am) Google: what to do when you’re so scared of your own brain
The misfortune of being palmed off with an incorrect brain, I’ve found, can be rather insulting to anyone trying to establish themselves as a functioning member of society- a degree-haver becoming an adult and a writer whose bread and butter might be aided by a coherent and unified brain. It’s difficult to find and cultivate a voice when one’s brain is garbling lies or half-truths or elusive absolutisms that are so combative to establishing any semblance of selfhood. One might console themselves by noting that the Kafkas, Bukowskis, Plaths and Woolfs of the world were on the whole, rather unwell, and perhaps, suicides aside, the odds are in my favour. Yet, their particular strains of derangement tend toward the more languid and romantic, and alas I was left to reckon with the fact that my iteration of madness is, by comparison, profoundly unsexy. In the end, the doctor alleged that I was in fact in my own body, it was just an obsessive and a compulsive one.
The most frustrating aspect of such a strange affliction is how farcical it appears to any level-headed confidante. Your body can’t really move past the bad thoughts it conjures, if any distressing thought passes (as they so often do), they cannot pass as entities separate from one’s character, the obsessive brain lurches at the live-wire thought, its fleshy neurotic muscle seizes into tetany, incapable of release until untangled and swiftly attended to. As such, loved ones will inevitably end up chewing the cud with you at one point or another, reasoning with you as to why it’s almost certainly impossible you submitted a sex tape alongside your dissertation, mostly owing to the fact one simply does not exist. Or that you’ve been composing and uploading finely-tuned manifestos detailing elaborate bomb plots to the dark web in your sleep. Perhaps even that when you’ve forgotten what you had for dinner yesterday you’ve also blocked out one of your potentially routine killing sprees, and that knock at the door was really a SWAT team and so on and so on.
(May 17th 2022 5:48pm) Google: is it normal to have the same thought over and over again
(May 17th 2022 5:52pm) Google: i think my brain is making up wrong memories
Very soon, you turn inward and stay there. Days are consumed by the sorting and resorting of thoughts until Sisyphus and Prometheus become your brothers in arms. It’s a breakless shift employed as your mind’s own crooked bathroom attendant, hunched and sour and deliberating between the noose or bottle of Prozac when you clock off in twelve lifetimes time. You may even come very close to asking a frightened stranger to take you to a nice field to gaze upon the Salinas River and dream of tending to rabbits before they shoot you in the back of the head. Because, you see, obsessive compulsive disorder is a beast fattened by shame, and I was shovelling heaps of piping hot shame into my brain’s mouth’s stomach. The particular cruelty of this symptom is that in suppressing any form of release, it becomes a self-sustaining feedback loop, transmitting the knowledge that, no, you cannot seek comfort because you certainly do not deserve it, and to speak of it would be to die of it.
This is where many are often left, chugging around a circular track miles away from the nearest doctor’s office or much semblance of real civilisation- and this is where we must castrate the beast (shame, naturally, lives in the testicles) with its only known predator, the willing ear of another. Unfortunately, this feels a great deal like seppuku, the samurai auto-disembowelment ritual, which at points feel preferable to the possibility of a doctor carting you off to a high-security prison for crimes against humanity, the likes of which never before seen by man nor beast.
(January 9th 2024 9:49am) Google: do drs know about intrusive thoughts or will they think I’m crazy
(October 14th 2025 9:49am) Google: how to talk to a dr about pure ocd
(September 9th 2021 7:24pm) Google: intrusive thoughts
(October 14th 2025 10:02am) Google: can a gp diagnose ocd
Obsessive compulsive disorder makes little sense to most, and the prospect of becoming convinced you’re really a serial killer because you listened to a true crime podcast despite being a fourteen year old, very sensitive, very neurotic girl is superficially quite funny. But one’s obsessions do feel like immutable facts one has to coax out of themselves and attempt to disprove before the brain consents to think about anything else again, albeit temporarily. Obsessions do feel inextricable with, or definitive of, one’s character- however they tend to be the precise inverse of it, the obsessive and compulsive brain fixates on that which it fears most to be true, making the thoughts not confessions but rather fundamental contradictions of one’s core values. This is at least what the less fun BuzzFeed quiz at the doctors office and a formal diagnosis eventually confirmed.
I suspect the vast majority of readers will not be suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder, and may be reading confused or acutely concerned, which is okay, this is the piece of writing I sailed the seven seas of search engines looking for, and perhaps it will be that for a few sitting somewhere someplace. Moral scrupulosity is, however, a universal dread, and so I leave you with this: bad people tend not to be concerned with their own badness. Our goodness is entirely in our hands. It is not characterised by cognitive misfires of unrelenting bad thoughts, it is comprised of curated choices, a lifelong project exacted through continuous self-examination. One must let thoughts pass, weatherlike, observed as the waste product of a brain untethered to character. As Socrates, perhaps the North star of ethical life, died positing: the un-examined life is indeed not worth living, so perhaps there is something to be learnt from the obsessive and compulsive brain? The disorder is indeed a disorder, not a moral saviour in paradoxical disguise, yet, it boils down to the purest, most potent expression of Socratic self-interrogation available to man- morally rigorous albeit factually deranged.
Featured Image – detail from Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas