Dark Places

"I’ve been to all kinds of different rooms in my life, so the fight that I have on a constant basis is just to try and better myself and not regress and to find a new way forward in a healthier manner. My dark places are very specific; people live in violence, abject poverty and crime and I have no idea of the depths of their despair and suffering; my suffering on a scale of one to 10 is probably one, but it’s my pain and coming from where I come from. I don’t pretend to know anything about great suffering. I’ve had a bit of a rough life but it wasn’t that bad and I’m very lucky." - Tom Hardy

Looks like Tom Hardy is one really smart cookie. I find myself drawing a lot of inspiration and motivation from his words. How can anyone not love this guy for saying something so profoundly true for so many people, but can't really put into words?

I really like the fact that he readily admits that he don't really have a reason for his past, and that he was the way he was because it was just the way it was.

So many people think that the people who has done, supposedly, terrible things or went off the wrong way are the way they are because they had a sob story or some tragedy happened to them in their lives to change them. While some may believe that just because a person does what is classified as a bad thing according to the many, many severely flawed social norms means that they are evil. But maybe these people are not evil. They are simply different.

Sometimes it just so happens that a potential bad situation presents itself, and some of us became part of that situation. Without truly understanding the motivation or intention behind a person, no one can say for sure whether this person is good or bad.

Say if a man's friend gets him to rob a bank with him. Imagine if this man robbed the bank to fuel his drug addiction. Now imagine if he robbed the bank to fuel his drug addiction because he has a life-threatening illness that requires him to use this "drug" which is very expensive. Then imagine that he used to hit his mother. At which point do you really arrive at the real conclusion? Now think about the friend, who wants to rob the bank only because he is jobless and wants to put food on the table for his wife and two kids.

Point is, you never really know, do you?

I am not saying that this justifies anyone's wrongdoings but everyone has their own problems. A girl's loneliness from not having friends may never compared to the suffering of hungry orphans living in the streets, but everyone has their own dark places, which they deserves to wallow in until they can find a way out of it. And we should all learn to respect that.