I hold grudges. It's one of the several unattractive things about my psychological makeup. I know all the Buddhist/Karmic sayings about how you're lighter if you don't carry that stuff with you, how you should put the ungrateful passenger down on the other side of the river instead of carrying her all the way to town--I can see the wisdom in such statements and analogies, and am even prepared to say that yes, that is indeed the best way to live.
The problem is, I've never been very good at that. It's very, very hard for me to let go of past pain, from inadvertent meannesses to full-on intentional tortures. They stick with me. Maybe it's my well-exercised memory for emotional events. I can't forget, and therefore can't often forgive.
The girls in junior high school who passed me forged notes from their friends, giggling at the victim girl's cries of denial and mortification at the very thought that I might believe it was from HER. The upperclassmen shouting "Fatso!" out the window of their car passing me at the bus stop. Having a heart so easily and carelessly broken--in high school, at church camp, at prom, in college, more than once. Cast off by friends, rejected by lovers, shamed by those I'd admired--I keep a list of hurts and betrayals written in my skin, line after line tattooed and inexpungable.
Even knowing that I'm better off for the pain--those girls who broke my heart were not the right ones for me, and had I succeeded with them things would doubtless have been worse than they are; the friend who betrayed me set me on a road for better things in the end--even that knowledge does not erase my bad feelings--my frank, painful hate. It's a failing, I know--I'd be a more cheerful sort if I could shrug it off, let it roll down my back, soak into the dust at my heels and disappear. But I'm not made that way, I guess. I never have been.
Because that pain IS me, in a real and I think important way. Without the pain, without the heartbreak, without the anger it occasioned, I'd be someone else. Someone better? Worse? Maybe. Who knows. But definitely someone ELSE. And maybe that's why I don't let go. Maybe that pain has become my identity, and I'd be lost without it.
I don' t mean to imply I'm made entirely of pain--I am made of joy too, of happiness, of pleasure, of pride and guilt and shame and exuberance and exaltation. It just seems that we're often called upon to deny our pain, to ignore it, to pretend it's something other than what it is. That to admit it, accept it, embrace it is somehow a sin. Which maybe it is. I don't know. I just don't know how else to be.
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter - bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."
--Stephen Crane
What pains make you who you are? Read More......
