Resentment: It’s Not Just for Rat Poison Anymore

People sometimes confuse anger with resentment. Anger, we all know. In acting, they say that anger’s the easiest emotion to portray. In life, it’s the safest emotion to feel.

Anger can be justified, but most anger – which always feels justified – really isn’t. They call justified anger outrage, and the world, at given times, will always seek to rationalize certain types of anger based on the current historical, religious or political background. Yet that background is always changing. Who is excused in doing what to whom doesn’t stay the same from generation to generation, which shows that the justifications for any given outrage have little to do with the truth. Truly justified anger is rare, though while we are experiencing it, we’ll always feel that our anger is justifiable.

With that said, anger does need expression, or it tends to be a dangerous animal. If I deny it, it turns into depression. If I try to contain it, it often jumps the fence. Anger is energy. It needs to come out. We can use it to motivate us. So much for anger.

Resentment often has a different quality than anger. You can tell this from the root of the Latin word from which it came, which, translated into English, means to resend or to re-feel. Resentment is like a cud, that meal of a cow which, not fully digested, regurgitates out of its first stomach to be rechewed when the cow has time to think on things. Kind of like Milk Duds; there’s always more to be re-experienced. I suppose that’s why cows have so many stomachs. We, on the other hand, have only one, and we can only stomach so much anger. A day’s worth, to be exact.

Resentment is anger that’s more than a day old. Jesus said not to let the sun go down on your anger. My mom, who, like every mother was a close competitor to Jesus in the early years of this boy’s life, told me never to go to bed mad. Both of these wise people alluded to the same truth: that anger must be offloaded quickly, or it destroys its own container.

Anger and resentment both have the same origins. They begin with an expectation. You shouldn’t have snubbed me. Don’t you know who I am? Why does this always happen to me? Maybe I order sweet potato fries and they send me French fries instead. Hey, life is hard.

My expectations are often unmet. People snub me all the time without realizing it. Astrophysicists have discovered that the black hole at the center of the Milky Way is named Mike Just. Those unrealized expectations quickly lead to disappointment. But this can happen so fast that I experience only anger, which conceals the more vulnerable feeling of being let down. Underneath the disappointment is something even more threatening: fear or sadness. But I often hide these other emotions – disappointment, fear, sadness – because they’re less safe to experience and express than anger, which brings with it a sense of power and justice. But the anger gets old. It ages. It ferments. If I don’t get rid of it in about a day, it spoils. It becomes a resentment.

Some readers will argue with what I’m writing, perhaps precisely because their resentments wish to speak for themselves, to justify the space they take up in their minds. Our grudges seem to take on lives of their own. We all have stories about how somebody screwed us over and none of it was our fault. We may get a perverse pleasure out of regurgitating our victimization or our trauma. It may give us a sense of importance, an identity, or an excuse to extract revenge. We want to defend these points of view; or I should say, the stories want to validate themselves. So, we come up with a good story about why our resentment is vindicated. For me, it’s about being right. I can only be right to the degree that I make somebody else wrong.

Anger is energy, and for some of us, it’s the only way we know we’re still alive. Our resentments and the stories which support our resentments can become a big part of our identities. We can organize our psyches around them, and they can even be a cohesive force for our social group, be that a partnership, a family, a religion, a party, a nation, or a race. There, I said it, and some of you will stop reading right here. Because your resentment will tell you to. It’ll say that your story makes more sense than I do, and that if you keep on reading, you’ll have some feelings to deal with. You know your story is in charge when you hear yourself going Yeah, but

I know I have a resentment – backed up by my story – when I start rehearsing in my mind, fighting with someone who isn’t even present: I should’ve said THAT to her. That really woulda showed them! Who do you think you fucking are!? which translated without the rationalizing power of its story becomes: Don’t you know who I am? The resentful mind, made up of a committee, by a committee and for the committee, consists mainly of thoughts such as these swirling around within me, composing my sense of ‘I.’ We spend great portions of our lives in there, in those single occupancy rooms within our minds, each room rented out by a different grievance which never pays its rent.

But consider that it’s all just programming. And you get to decide who stays and who goes in your motel. None of them are real. The occupants seem real and vital because they’re driven by fury and power, but like Shakespeare said: It’s a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. When I’m saying that I’m justified, that idiot is me.

So, I like what my mom told me about not going to bed mad. It makes a lot of sense to me. And if I can manage it, I try to flush my anger before bedtime, or it’s liable to poke me on the shoulder at 2 in the morning as it lays next to me in a bed not big enough for the both of us. Hey, it growls. We got some unfinished business. And i smells on its cigar and sniffs under its hairy armpits. Yeah, my resentments are that ugly.

And then I’ll end up watching black and white reruns of Perry Mason because, like my resentments, the show is made up of reruns so black and white that they help me not to think. Black and white means the good guys and the bad guys. It means I’m right and you’re wrong.

The solution? Don’t let the sun go down on your anger. Anger is a fruit which must be eaten on the day it’s picked or it spoils. Maybe one day, I’ll let it all go and not even get angry in the first place. Maybe I’ll get all Zenlike, but so far, that hasn’t happened because I can’t help having an expectation. I imagine even the Buddha lost it a few times. Can you imagine him slapping around one of his disciples? Or kicking the Bodhi Tree when he didn’t get enlightenment, then jumping up and down on the other foot and holding his stubbed toe? Or Jesus watching reruns of Perry Mason in the middle of the night?  Maybe hold that image the next time you get mad.

© 2022 by Michael C. Just

Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.

You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23

Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002

Four of his short stories have recently been published online:

Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)

The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW

I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October

Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within