I Am Not Bad Energy

“I Am Not Bad Energy” is an affirmation Inya teaches Janae Morrison in therapy, answering the shame that has gathered around her relationship with Robert Walters. Its force lies in the change of grammar it offers: Janae need not accept “bad energy” as a definition of who she is.

The Label and Its Context

Before Inya offers the affirmation, Janae describes how close she and Robert Walters once were and how their relationship changed that closeness. Inya names two parts of the injury: Robert frightened Janae, and his denial hurt her further. She connects that denial to a wider pattern in which other people’s judgments keep reminding Janae that she is supposedly “bad energy.”

That label is not simply an abstract insult in Janae’s story. Robert Walters publicly denied their affair, while media attention and community hostility made Janae the target of degrading judgment. The affirmation answers that accumulated stigma without pretending that the rejection or its consequences did not happen.

Inya’s Intervention

Inya responds from the position of a counselor offering help, not condemnation. She tells Janae that she recognizes “bad energy” but does not see Janae that way, then gives her a sentence to repeat: “I am not bad energy.” Janae repeats it, and Inya instructs her to say it until she believes it.

The exchange turns a counselor’s reassurance into an act Janae can perform herself. The words do not erase Robert Walters’s denial or the social judgment attached to it; instead, they challenge Janae’s absorption of those judgments as a complete account of her character. Repetition matters because the affirmation is not presented as an instant cure: Inya frames belief as something Janae may need to approach by saying the words again.

A Counter-Narrative of Identity

The phrase belongs to a broader pattern in the novel in which painful identities are given names and then reconsidered. Jensen Brick McCall calls his birth mother his murderer because he believes she tried to end his life and allowed him to be left to die; later, he describes finding not only the person he sought but himself. That parallel does not make Janae’s circumstances the same as Jensen Brick McCall’s. It highlights a shared narrative movement: a defining label can express genuine injury while still falling short of the whole person.

For Janae, “I Am Not Bad Energy” is a compact counter-narrative. It does not declare her blameless in every part of her past, nor does it deny her pain. It gives her a way to resist the conversion of other people’s rejection into a fixed identity, and marks therapy as a setting where that identity can be questioned rather than merely imposed.