July 1, 2024:

Then why return to it? Again and again, seemingly.

Because anger.

Unresolved, perhaps unresolvable. Circling, predatory, waiting on its time.

June 30, 2024:

The apparatus of evil collapses into pettiness. "His pettiness fit you like a second skin": evil revealed as the flattering costume pettiness wears. Neither of them is evil. They're small, where "evil" is the word smallness uses to feel large.

She calls him evil because she thrills to his smallness. "The willingness to inflict egregious little hurts," because "he did openly" what she wanted to do.

But truth is both harder than that and more generous. The real reality, "lost in the noise": her "burden of seething and legitimate anger."

The misused word "evil" is a vehicle, the "transparent carrier", projecting onto that petty man her own need for redress against a world that had actually wronged her. The word is see-through: you can look through "evil" to the reality behind it. It's legitimate rage seeking targets.

She is not evil. She is small, and narcissistic. Her pettiness was unempowered reaction to real harms, legitimate harms. None of which excuses what she did, to others and to me.

June 29, 2024:

"He's so evil."

Yes and "evil" means "small" and you're so petty and we've covered that already.

Lost in the noise: your burden of seething and legitimate anger. Over your dysfunctional home world; the alcoholic embezzlement of your college fund; the way that fat band manager treated you (a feeble xerox of your father, if you ask me); your inability to manipulate the milieu of people who were professionals at it; and perhaps, and perhaps most immediately for my own purposes, the harm you'd received from me. The hurt, certainly.

So that "he's so evil." acted as the transparent carrier of your own desire for some kind of payback to a world which had legitimately left you with grievances which were real, and which legitimately triggered real need for response.

None of which excuses the ineptitude of the responses you chose. Or their harmfulness to others, where "others" of course means me.