The other night, I journaled the following passage:
“I wish my loved ones loved me the way I love them. I wish they showed up for me in the way that I would show up for them. I have so much resentment buried within me. It’s just been piling up. And I just carry it around all the time. It never leaves my body. I run it over and over again in my mind. Holy, I have so much resentment.”
It feels like my resentment was turned up on high volume this summer. I did nothing but sit in the narrow, dark halls of resentment, spiralling into lows of anger and hurt. It didn’t matter what anyone did or said. I was always resentful that it wasn’t more.
It’s only recently that I’ve been able to understand that what I’ve been feeling is resentment. Before this realization, I was confused. I couldn’t figure out if I was angry, hurt, envious, or just making a big deal out of nothing. I kept asking myself again and again, “why are you so hurt? Why can’t you just get over things like everybody else does? Why do things impact you so much?” Resentment. I’ve made a home out of resentment and it seems like I’ve refused to step out of the house.
I’ve been reading Brene Brown’s “Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of the Human Experience”. I took it to the beach with me one day, propping myself down on a big boulder and allowing her words to fill my heart with all that it’s been craving. When I arrived at her definition of resentment, I was stunned.
She defines resentment as, “the feeling of frustration, judgment, anger, ‘better than’, and/or hidden envy related to perceived unfairness or injustice. It’s an emotion that we often experience when we fail to set boundaries or ask for what we need, or when expectations let us down because they were based on things we can’t control, like what other people think, what they feel, or how they’re going to react.”
I sat at the beach for five hours alone that day, running through Brown’s definition of resentment over and over again, pulling it apart and teasing out its specifics. It felt like a deep exhale. I started to take all the hard things that had happened this year, holding them up against her definition of resentment. It finally clicked. I was feeling anger and hurt yes, but it was all packaged neatly in a bow titled resentment.
I’d been feeling frustrated that my loved ones didn’t see me. I mean, they see me, but they don’t really see me. I was feeling judgment for all the choices people in my life had made, which made me angry because I wanted them to want better for themselves. Often, that “better for themselves” meant choosing me over what they decided to choose, causing a sense of anger deep inside of me. And I did that because I considered myself better than their choice. Of course, there was envy.. I was envious that things came so easily to them, when all I did was sit in the darkest parts of self-love and yet, not unlock what I truly wanted.
I was feeling resentful for the way I was treated after I failed to set strong boundaries and honour myself. I was feeling resentful because I didn’t ask for what I truly needed or wanted when I had the chance, and I was mostly feeling resentful because I had different expectations for the outcome of the situations than what ended up happening. I was unable to control my intended outcome, control what others thought of me, how they felt about me, and how they ended up reacting.
I was feeling resentful for not having agency in the way people treated me.
Tara Brach in “Radical Acceptance: Embracing your life with the heart of a Buddha” defines resentment as, “to feel again”. She says, “each time we repeat to ourselves a story of how we’ve been wronged, we feel again in our body and mind the anger at being violated. But often enough our resentment of others reflects our resentment of ourselves.”
So then, resentment isn’t something that is caused by others. Resentment is something that we induce in ourselves. I know the resentment that I carry is all my own and no one else’s. My resentment shows up when my family fails to see how much I carry. My resentment shows up when the friend I love with my entire heart cuts me out of her life. My resentment shows up when the guy I was being patient with ghosts me. My resentment shows up when I don’t get a check-in text message from my loved ones when something goes terribly wrong.
I feel resentment and my resentment is all entirely mine. I didn’t inherit the resentment from anywhere else. I watered it and gave it all the sunlight in the word, all on my own.
With Brown’s definition now in my arsenal, I’m able to see resentment as something that I can undo. My resentment shows up when I don’t move through all those feelings of frustration, judgment, anger, and envy, which means I should sit with it more. My resentment shows up when I fail to set boundaries and communicate clearly, which means I need radical boundaries and open dialogue with both myself and others. My resentment shows up when I loved myself less, when really I should’ve loved myself more, which means I still have a long way to go on my journey of self-love.
When resentment comes knocking on my door, I want nothing but to run away. Right after I wrote the passage about resentment in my journal, I also wrote this one:
“I always have a desire to run away and escape. To be alone, to retreat. To be with myself. It always feels very heart centered. Like my heart wants to retreat and be away from everyone and everything.”
But running away from my resentment would mean running away from myself. And running away from myself would be abandoning myself. And I’ve promised myself that we don’t do that anymore.
And so, I’m here. And I’m going to stay here. I’ve become masterful at weathering this storm. I know I can’t control the weather, but I can control how I build my shelter from the rain. Sunny days will come, but perhaps right now is not the season for it. I haven’t figured out what the antidote to resentment is just quite yet. I’m hoping that, when the clouds clear and the rain pauses, perhaps it’ll come to me in the way that first ray of sun peeks out.
Harpo is a visionary, thought leader, community builder, storyteller, and cultural producer. Her mission is to be the vessel through which you experience love. She is a brown girl who adores being a brown girl and is navigating and unpacking her brown girl guilt, while continuously exploring what a world without that guilt looks like for herself and her didis.
@itsharpo
