I don't think any reasonable person makes it their goal to be a perfectly healthy person. Chasing after purity is an exercise in futility and neuroticism.

It is enough for me to have identified my own demons. I know the location and dimensions of the parts of my psyche that have acted out in the past in ways which hurt people I care about.

That I am comfortable with their presence within me startles some people because they imagine they do not have any demons of their own. Of course they do. They are just unaware of theirs. Demons which remain hidden can do a lot more damage.

I have mine figured out and constrained. They are predictable, as it goes with the banality of evil. They are a narrow part of me and have correspondingly narrow, tedious desires which I can now reliably deny them, having discovered what they are.

I am a mix of good and bad, because I have had many good and bad experiences and I suppose I am as much a product of those experiences as anybody else. Being self-aware about that does not seem to empower me to self-purify, though.

That's because when I try to remove the bad parts, there is always some deeply compelling reason why it ought to be there. "Why does the world teach you that when you are mistreated, you may not retaliate? Doesn't that effectively mean I am the only one it is permissible to mistreat, and that I simply have to endure it?"

Seductive voices of apparent logic that prevent me from ripping out these spoiled parts of myself as a surgeon excises tumors. But another voice tells me that those parts are just my fear, sadness and anger. That they should be embraced and nurtured back to health, not brutally destroyed. They are, themselves, reactions to brutality in the first place.

But is that voice the good part of me? Or more of the appealing, seemingly airtight lies whispered by my demons?