#114
on holding grudges
Richard Ziegler, 1928
I feel like I’m stripping in front of a two-way mirror.
Writing emails like:
Burying all my hatchets, even the gun.
Undoing spells.
Fran Lebowitz claims she can hold a grudge “forever”. And I’m sure she can, petty as she is. But I take issue with her false equivalence that holding grudges is the same as having standards.
Having standards looks like this.
Being unable to rise above your ego in interpersonal situations looks like this.
I’ve never been able to hold a grudge. It’s not that I forgive and forget — who the hell can ever forget?— but I do forgive, or at least I have, and I continue to try to because I don’t see the appeal in the other options. Why should I hold onto resentment for someone when my anger could be better channeled elsewhere: like at the forces that stand between people and liberation, or everything else that makes up the hell we live in.
Wasting or misapplying the thumotic, especially right now, feels Sacrilegious.
Lebowitz says she has two needs: cigarettes and revenge. I completely understand. But revenge and grudges are not the same, not to me. Revenge can be silent, a single moment, a brief satisfaction, good timing; the littlest thing. Grudges on the other hand are always loud with effort and marked with time. It’s the hubris of it all: foolishly assuming you won’t be moved or changed by time. Standing firm in the arrogant delusion of some immunity to life and its shifts. Unwavering in the face of opportunities to soften your grip.
Of course, not everyone deserves to be forgiven. But if you can’t forgive, you can try to forget, maybe, there has to be another way, not just endlessly fueling and justifying a grudge.
I’m well aware that people love holding grudges, that pettiness is in, and that most of you reading will be quick to dismiss all this. That is fine, tend to your grudges as you see fit; your rose bushes of bitterness.
But please, for the love of God: let’s not attribute them to some underlying nobility.
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Reading this in the midst of a chronic, legal nastiness that has made me vicious and unkind. I can tell that I don’t like myself because looking in the mirror is more difficult. I feel like my body has changed. Like the ugliness I feel about someone else has transformed me. I appreciate your writing, as always.