In story, the main character’s tragic faults are usually what cause all the conflict and drama, bringing about his or her downfall. In a romance, those same faults might cause a few misunderstandings in the beginning, but in the end become something acceptable.

Yeah, faults are all that and more, but they are always so dressed up in the people you want to like—your friends, yourselves, the heroes and heroines. And villains get all the undressable faults, the ones you can’t dress up to look good, the ones that are hands down no good at all and unacceptable in any human being—evil, selfish, cruel, vindictive, cold, incompetent, and narcissistic … et cetera. People with faults like these are usually given unhappy endings because everyone agrees they deserve it.

But “good” people … they are never conceited; they’re arrogant. They’re never mousy; they’re shy. They never play the victim; they’re just long-suffering souls. They’re never stubborn; they’re just strong-willed. And when we describe ourselves and our faults, we paint ourselves in such subtle ways so that our negatives are really seen as positives.

At a job interview, for instance, when asked for my drawbacks, I always say:

Well, I work too hard sometimes—I’ve got a little bit of the obsessive-compulsive in me that makes me take on more than I need to, and I’m a chronic pleaser, so it’s hard for me to say no to new projects. Hence, I often end up doing the work of two or three people.

It’s a real fault that H.E. likes to point out regularly, saying that I often cheat myself of the requisite pay or of some real time to myself, and that I should stop doing that, but to an employer, it’s not a bad thing at all. In fact, it’s an asset.

But this post is all about honesty, and I’m not here to impress anybody, so I’m going to reveal some faults that can’t in any way be viewed in a good light by anyone, faults that are usually attributed to secondary characters designed to be completely unattractive to the reader. We all have them, these undressable faults, but we never really like to admit that.

Well, I’m admitting mine.

First, I whine. Maybe not so much any more, but I really and truly was a whiner, and I dare you to find anyone else out there who would freely admit that about themselves. Whining, after all, is a really ugly fault, acceptable only in four-year-olds.

I remember the first time I was ever at a cheer camp. I was unused to all the work and the exercise, and I was tired, cranky, sweaty as hell, and in pain. No one else seemed to feel the same way, and I couldn’t figure out why. I was sure I had to tell them all how I felt so that maybe we could take a break or two, and I began whining to no one in particular.

I had no idea then that I was whining. In my mind, I was just enumerating all the aches and pains I had, and whew! Was this cheerleading hard work or what? I never really noticed Samantha glaring at me or some of the others gritting their teeth or muttering under their breath. But one of my cheer captains pulled me aside and said low in my ear that they all felt that way, but maybe I shouldn’t show it.

Ooh, duly chastised! I felt like a total heel and, except for shouting cheers, kept my mouth shut for the rest of the day.

A year or two later, Samantha told me how much she couldn’t stand me in those first few months of my being a cheerleader because I was whiny and slow to learn the cheers, and I totally saw myself as one of those characters you’re designed to hate in a story—the kind you want to slap upside the head until they straighten out. So whining, for me, is a biggie.

Second, I’m lazy. When I’m not obsessive-compulsive about my work, I’m obsessive-compulsive about avoiding my work. I’ll have no qualms about putting things off or of sleeping in or doing nothing but lying in bed and reading trash. I’ll let things clutter up on my desk, on the floor, around the condo, and all over the place, and rather than go through the trouble of preparing myself something to eat when I’m hungry, I might sometimes nuke a frozen dinner like a bachelor or snack on stale bread from my cupboard and packaged jellies swiped from a restaurant.

Laziness is probably a more acceptable fault than whininess or any other fault, as I’m sure many others out there have it, but there it is, still a fault that simply can’t be dressed up. A writer would rather paint their hero or heroine as a hard worker rather than as a lazy ass, which I know I can be.

Third, I’m inattentive. Sometimes, in the middle of a conversation, I’ll lose all interest in what’s being said and start drifting off—meaning I am jack shit as a listener. Or it’ll take a while for my attention to spool up, so that I miss the first two lines of whatever it is anyone tells me. The inattention is not immediately evident, as it’s built into me that I maintain the facade of listening and sometimes even think to myself that I am listening when I really, truly am not.

I don’t know if it’s because of my inherent impatience (yet another fault) or if it’s simply because I just don’t care (still another fault), but other people’s words will go from being intelligible ideas in my head to being background noise, and my mind will start going off on tangents, jumping train tracks and skipping channels, and only a few choice words will penetrate enough to provide me with something to latch on to on my journey back into the conversation. Then, unfortunately for me, I end up replying with something that I think is an original response but is actually a paraphrased regurgitation of something the other person might have said, though it didn’t quite penetrate my foggy head.

“But I just said that,” they’d say. “You weren’t listening.” And I’d feel like a total heel.

Or I respond with something completely off-topic, which is even worse, as it becomes plain as day that I really, seriously wasn’t listening.

It’s one of those faults that would feel at home in an older husband type character who always has his head buried in the paper while his chatterbox of a wife goes on and on about the inconsequential events of her everyday life. Except in me, it doesn’t matter if the other person is talking about beans and peas or war and peace. Mundane or significant, my inattention pops up every now and then without warning and makes me pay for it in the end.

H.E. tells me that it’s one of my defense mechanisms from childhood, when I felt I had to block out all the negativity in my life and go off in my own little world, but it still frustrates him to no end when it happens for no apparent reason during one of our conversations because he feels like it’s a reflection of how I feel for him, which in my mind is so very far from the truth. It’s a fault that I wish I didn’t have, as it truly is a problem and can’t be dressed up in any way. Some people might dress it up with the word absentmindedness, but it’s really just plain rudeness. I am crappy at listening and sometimes have no patience or endurance for marathon conversations. I just plain suck at it.

So I’m a lazy, impatient, no-good whiner who doesn’t listen or doesn’t care. There’s no way I’m a heroine in some romance novel with faults like that. They make a character simply too unattractive. Heck, I’m probably the evil ex who tries to break up the romantic couple, except for the fact that I wouldn’t do that. Not intentionally, anyway.

The point is, we all have faults that can’t be dressed up, but because everyone sees themselves as the main characters in their own book, no one ever admits those faults about him or herself. And what faults they are ready to acknowledge, they dress up so they feel better about them. They’re never self-absorbed; they’re self-aware. They never wallow in self-pity; they simply have low self-esteem. They’re never flighty; they’re passionate. They’re never ignorant; they’re just naive. It’s like saying you’re big-boned when you’re really just plain fat.

It takes some guts to admit one’s hard core and ugly faults, in the most unattractive light possible, and I’m not just saying that so it seems I’m being gutsy to admit these things about myself. I’m saying that as a dare to everyone else to really look at themselves and see how truly non-heroic we all are in our everyday lives. Except for those of us who wallow in self-pity (of which I’m sometimes guilty), our default position is to see all the bad in others but none of the bad in ourselves. And sometimes, the bad we see so clearly in others is really the same kind of bad we don’t quite see in ourselves—the pots calling the kettles black.

Other times, we just fail to put ourselves in other people’s shoes and see the things in us that bother them so much. A mother might feel she is only providing gentle helpful reminders to a forgetful son, and her son might feel she is being a total nag. A wife might feel she is showing her love by providing a cozy home for her workaholic husband, and her husband might feel she is spending too much of his hard-earned money on useless decorative items.

Ever notice that there are always two sides to a story and the one telling it is always the good guy, while the other one’s at fault?

This is why.

I’m not saying that we’re bad people, but we are generally blind to our own faults, while we see them so easily in others. And what faults we do see in ourselves, we end up justifying … or describing in such a way that they don’t seem like faults at all, thereby painting ourselves relatively as saints. The worst we might call these faults is bad habits, saying things like, “I have a hard time remembering names, faces, and phone numbers,” when we really should be saying things like, “I frankly don’t care enough about other people to note their names and faces, let alone their phone numbers, on a first or fifth meeting.”

Or we hide our faults, like skeletons in a closet or like demons in our own personal hell, refusing to acknowledge them in a healthy way so that we can finally learn from them and overcome them, changing for the better. After all, you can’t change what you are unless you already know what you are.

I’m lazy, whiny, and inattentive. I’m impatient; I don’t particularly care for most people and judge them too harshly; and I share far too much about myself than I probably should (too much dirty laundry out in public!). Oh, yeah, I’m wishy-washy, and I pick at my skin A LOT. Screw that “I don’t pick at my acne … too much” crap that I once wrote—that’s just a prime example of a nervous nit-picky woman minimizing her own faults so that she doesn’t have to accept them for what they are.

But admit it: you all minimize your own faults, too.

So I dare you all to look really hard and be brutally honest with yourselves. What are your undressable faults, faults you wouldn’t ever accept in another person, let alone a hero or heroine, but dress up in you for your own benefit? All so you can still like yourself at the end of the day. All so you can be the protagonist in your own book of life.

The big secret? We’re all characters in the same book, whatever our faults and however bad they are, and yet, of all the characters in that book, the true protagonists are the ones who actually change.

It’s called an arc.

Know your faults and change them. Don’t dress them up.

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