Rent Free

What I've learned from watching wrongdoers thrive — and why I finally let go of needing them to fall

free rent

Throughout my life, I have constantly wondered why people of integrity have the most difficult lives and people who lack integrity seem to thrive and live on forever.

I grew up watching a friend’s father struggle through divorces and legal issues from abusive in-laws… all to pass away at the age of 60 from cancer. A man who did everything he could to provide for and protect his family, who worked hard and always pushed to be a better person, and always insisted that his son be a person of integrity in everything he did growing up.

On the flip side, I saw his mother lie, cheat, steal, manipulate, and use others for her entire life. To this day, she still does. And yet somehow, she manages to get by and cancer has ignored her decades of smoking packs of cigarettes daily.

Some will say that God won’t give you more than you can handle. Others will say, “it’s just the way things are.”

But what if it’s neither of the two? What if extreme burdens aren’t something pushed upon good people in a world that rewards everyone else? What if it isn’t just a flip of the coin or a roll of the dice for the wrongdoers?

I believe in a certain type of Karma, if you will.

The type that puts the wrongdoer through a slow hell-on-earth. For his mother, that’s through constant financial struggles, a slowly declining health, and constantly having to beg someone to have a place to live.

And while his father’s struggles were painful and took away his quality of life for several years in the end, I can only imagine the long, drawn-out torture of someone who has lived their entire life behind a wall of lies and manipulation.

It makes me question when they’ll finally get their due. But maybe it’s not for us to concern ourselves with when or how the reckoning comes, and to simply live our lives the best we can. After all, we don’t want them living “rent free” in our heads.

Frankly, for all we know, they are already in their own sort of suffering, but they happen to be good at putting on a performance for the world.

For those of us that know the mask they wear, we have no choice but to wait and see what life will bring them. Until then, we should continue to live honest, kind lives. Not because it protects us, but because it's who we are.