I used to have my very own grudge list. It existed only in my mind, of course, but written on these invisible, yet vibrant pages were the names of those who had wronged me. Those who had upset, betrayed or hurt me enough to make me remember it.
“That’s it!” I’d say to myself, “They have made it on to the list.” I’d scowl and stew and take a mental note of what the person had done. I’d ruminate over it and contrive how I could somehow get revenge and, in doing so, erase this horrible feeling of pain.
It wasn’t quite on the scale of Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo or even the Burn Book from Mean Girls (2004), but there were certainly a few noncorporeal pages to this imaginary text that often throbbed with anger and resentment.
I can still remember some of them.
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The boy who stole my pink racer bike when I was six and wouldn’t get off, even when I started roaring crying. The girl who tore down my poster in school, the one I’d worked so hard on. The teacher who made a point of humiliating me with my lack of oral skills in front of the whole class.
The unhinged boss I once worked for who, to cut costs, made me print off 1,500 delegate packs for a conference in-house instead of outsourcing it, which had me standing at a dodgy photocopier until well after midnight. Or the couple who owned the holiday home in France that my then fiance and I once stayed in. They felt it was totally reasonable to have an ex-fighting cockerel on their farm that had attacked two previous guests, and two days into the holiday, added me to his list of casualties, resulting in us having to cut our holiday short with me on crutches.
I could go on and on.
Holding a grudge feels like one of those truly universal human experiences, but we aren’t the only creatures to behave this way. They say an elephant never forgets and that you should never cross a crow, whatever you do, but few beings seem to harbour deep-seated resentment and allow it to consume them to the point of affecting their feelings and daily lives quite like people do.
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If only I’d known that it was all a total waste of time, because holding a grudge is completely counterintuitive. The secret is the name, of course, hiding in plain sight. You are the one who ends up holding the grudge and all the negativity associated with it, not the transgressor.
For the most part, unless you actually enact some kind of revenge fantasy, they just carry on with life, not caring where the sun sets on them. Deep down, I think we all know this, but when you’re in the thick of a hot, steaming grudge, it feels irresistible, because it gives you the illusion of reclaiming your power.
I look back at all the minutes and hours I spent thinking about my grudges and sigh. How I wanted to put my boss’s face in the old, broken-down photocopier and print until the ink ran out. The times I’d stand in the shower and mentally give that teacher an expletive-ridden piece of my mind and make her feel as small as she had made me feel.
The minutes I’d sit and think about the places I’d hide the bike of the boy who wouldn’t get off my precious pink racer, or how I’d skin the French cockerel who left me on crutches.
Mostly, these days, I just roll my eyes at all the time and energy I’ve wasted on grudges. And as much as I hate to be a cliche, the older I get, the less I hold on to negative things because they don’t serve me or make me happy. It’s a skill I just didn’t have when I was younger.
While that all sounds awfully Zen and sage of me, I’m no chilled-out Dalai Lama or all-forgiving Nelson Mandela either. What I’ve realised is that there’s a difference between letting things go and being a doormat, but I’m a work in progress. I’d still like to put that overgrown French chicken in a coq-au-vin and make that English couple eat it while I watched, and if you cut me off in traffic on the M50, you can expect to see my middle finger in return.
Still, most of it tends to be fleeting, minor stuff and not the epic grudges of my younger days that once could fill pages.
I’m only human, of course, and on the days when I find myself ready to reopen that imaginary book, strangely enough, it’s the dog that inspires me not to.
I look at my faithful Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Lily, and wonder how she manages to get through each day without ever really holding a grudge, despite all the reasons she might have to do so. All the times she’s been scolded by me for snoring so loudly she’d shake the house, or barking in the middle of the night, or the times she’s been left at home alone for longer than intended.
None of it ever seems to stick long enough in her memory bank to count as a grudge. She might give me a bit of side eye from time to time, but she never holds anything against me.
She doesn’t dwell on the past. She doesn’t worry about the future. She simply lives in the present moment, and these days I think she’s probably the wisest creature I know.
