Why being an assh*le, will help you not be an assh*le.
Recently I had a great moment of personal growth. I was able to get over a grudge. Yes, you read that right. Me, the troll that guards the proverbial bridge of wronged feelings. Me, who still bears a grudge against the girl in the 3rd grade who said something unkind to me and then got her older brother to weirdly enough, spit on me.
In a totally cathartic episode, I was able to make peace with one of my most toxic triggers. Something that has caused me over 3 years of angst, several meltdowns, and days of brain drain. I reached this state of emotional nirvana by not fighting my inner asshole but accepting it.
As we grow into adults and invariably get our hearts and our egos bruised, we hold on to grudges. We pretend to ourselves that we are over these gross injustices, we laugh, we mock, we cry and we quietly sweep it under the rugs of our consciousness, where it rears its ugly head once in a while in a form of a lucid dream or a jab of nostalgia that tugs at our heartstrings.
I am a person who has a real problem letting the pain of bad things go. This is a natural consequence of letting really toxic people into my life and then getting fucked over by them.
I tend to these emotional fissures like loving pets. I feed them, I water them, I take them out in the midday sun to bask. We are all guilty of if. We stalk our exes or people we just don’t like because they wronged us cruelly at some point. We watch them and feel a twinge of delight when something miserable happens to them or we sit and fantasise about how much we hate them.
It's petty. Of course, it is. New age lifestyle gurus, Whatsapp life hack forwards and shrinks will tell you to bury the hatchet, let it go, breathe. If only it were that easy.
I think hatred or holding a grudge is just a notion, fuelled by a more primal emotion. You may think that emotion is anger. But even anger, if you really think about it, is a secondary stratum to the real bedrock emotion — sadness.
After all, beneath all these layers of shiny sophistication, we all run on bullshit caveman software, and that’s a fact. To hate someone who has wronged you is human, it's natural.
Buddha said, “Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” He was right of course. Holding on to anger is terrible for you, it's really toxic. But superficially forcing yourself to be the nice guy and “letting it go” is like sticking a band-aid on a tumor. Just stupid.
Trying to suppress that emotion of pent-up hate, or get over it by being the “better person” or singing kumbaya with the person who hurt you is being unrealistic and to be fair, asking too much of yourself. Sometimes the best way to deal with a toxic emotion is to just feel it, wallow in it, allow yourself to be that asshole. It’s okay! it really is.
I have been through that journey of trying to make peace with the cruel things that horrible people have done to me. I have also felt the terrible whiplash of not being able to be “that better person” and make peace with them.
Being an asshole about said toxic event or person, with the clarity on why you are being that asshole, will ironically set you free from actually becoming an asshole, to yourself and the rest of the world.
Phew! 3 years of therapy and beating myself up summarised for you, my dear reader in under 3 mins.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not telling you to go out there and punch babies in the face will Ferrell style, I’m telling you to give yourself the permission to process or wallow in your toxic emotions without self-judgment until you genuinely reach a place, where you can let them go.
You are a flawed, complicated being, and allowing yourself permission to be that asshole(with clarity) is the best way to naturally process those emotions.
