The Slow Drip of Resentment
And how to shift the underlying beliefs that sustain it
Resentment, someone told me, is birthed from disconnection. On a visceral, human level, we want to connect to others but for whatever reason, it doesn’t seem like we can have what we want. The person we want to connect with is out of reach – they’ve hurt us somehow and we carry a wound that’s getting in the way. So we sit back and we resent the distance between us.
Or maybe our sense of disconnect comes from the beliefs we hold, whether conscious or unconscious. Probably one of the earliest beliefs I absorbed was that if I worked hard, my effort would eventually pay off. My good grades would lead me to employers. My hard work would be rewarded with a good position (whatever that is). I’d find satisfaction in my work. I’d have control over my time, not working too much or too little. I’d have a clear career path and be able to push forward, my job title steadily advancing on the basis of my effort.
If my relationship wasn’t all that satisfying, well, I’d simply work harder at it. I’d make it the relationship I wanted to be in. I’d go to therapy. I’d focus on self-care, asking for neither too little nor too much of anyone close to me. I’d throw myself into creating a home for us and cultivate my interests independently. I’d be sure not to lose my sense of self and retain my identity. Importantly, I’d always look like the model I was (briefly) at age 24.
If my life weren’t all that satisfying, well, I’d simply work harder at it. I’d craft it into one I wanted to live. I’d prioritize adventure and discovery so I wouldn’t feel stifled or trapped. I’d value learning, not material things. I’d compromise as needed and do things I didn’t want to do – but not too much or too often! I’d remember to reserve some parts of life just for myself, like a spicy bowl of noodles after a rainy commute.
And sometime around midlife, after a few decades of really working hard, I’d look around me and think, Look at all that I’ve built. I willed this into existence with my effort. I put in the years of unpaid labour to gain the experience. I slogged through the trenches before securing positions of greater responsibility, my salary keeping pace. I wrestled away the anger or hurt and chiselled off the disappointments to become lovable. I juggled it all and bit by bit, piece by piece, I created the life I wanted for myself.
Well, if you’ve been following this newsletter for even just a little while, you’ll know this is not at all how things turned out.
The strength of my belief that I’d succeed if I just tried hard enough first began to dilute, ever so slowly, at the end of adolescence. I had started to realize that although I’d been raised (upper) middle class, the impacts of my parents’ financial losses and descent into chronic precarity were permanent. Everyone else around me seemed able to just focus on school and socializing. But me? I needed to work to cover my expenses. I struggled to keep up with my pre-med classes because I had little free time to study.
Drip.
Everyone else could go out to dinner together and order according to preference rather than price; I could only afford the side of fries or uninspiring cup of soup (never drinks!).
Everyone else could drive wherever they wanted, meeting up with friends rather than rationing their gas for essential trips like commuting to work.
Everyone else had parents to turn to for advice, for financial support, for networking and job opportunities. They had parents who were actually invested in their lives, while I was left to navigate my own solo.
Drip, drip.
When I moved away, far overseas on what seemed like a grand adventure, I initially felt weightless. For the first time in my life, I was free of the burdens of my family. The sense of buoyancy was bolstered by a salary that afforded a middle-class lifestyle. Now I could go out to eat and order what I liked off the menu. Now I could go shopping whenever I wanted. Now I never had to worry about gas at all; I lived in a massive city with the world at my fingertips. I no longer needed anything from my parents.
But still. I noticed my friends didn’t seem to feel pressured to succeed. Especially the women I’d gone to university with – most didn’t appear to care all that much if they failed to achieve some career path. They seemed to simply trust their relationships to carry them through life. They were curiously able to do so.
My relationships weren’t all that trustworthy. My husband’s unhappiness was recurrent, no matter what changed in our life together. There was a gap between us, a perpetual disconnect that sometimes yawned large and other times narrowed but always, always remained.
Was it me? I was pretty sure the problem was me. I just wasn’t working hard enough to fix something about me that was messing up my marriage.
Drip, drip, drip.
When I moved back to my home country, a place I’d never lived as an adult, I floundered about trying to make a lateral job transition. I had the qualifications, but not the local experience. I’d never heard of the software package the other job applicants knew how to use. I had no personal contacts or networks. Email submissions multiplied like roaches in a dirty kitchen, interviews ended on a friendly but empty “we’ll be in touch”, and I was never quite right for a job position that strongly aligned with my skills.
Other people who hadn’t left for ten or twenty years, who’d stayed in the place they were trained, were doing so much better than me. They hadn’t necessarily worked as hard but they’d made different decisions. Their relationships seemed more reliable, more robust. They could give their children more. They had homes. Their careers were stable and they moved fluidly from one position to another. They even seemed to have more luck, of all things.
Why was I never content?
Why did I have so little to show for my hard work? Where was my retirement fund? Where were my job benefits, my paid vacation? Why was I earning so little?
What had I been doing with my life? Why had I always worked so hard? When would it pay off?
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
At the heart of the belief that drove my disconnect and sustained my resentment lay the false idea that I could control or otherwise shape the outcomes in my life. I believed I could do so simply by trying harder or organizing better.
This is a common belief, one we hear repeated so often it barely registers anymore. “I worked hard for what I have,” the entrepreneur blandly claims in an interview or on social media, as though the rest of us haven’t (often it’s the poor who work the hardest of all!). Of course, we nod along and continue scrolling or listening with half an ear cocked.
But the truth is none of us exert real control over any outcome in life; there will always be causal variables we cannot impact, no matter how hard we try.
It took me until my 30s to realize that life is not at all a meritocracy. What happens does not simply result from my hard work. Sometimes you try your best and things still don’t work out. You can’t shimmy your relationship into a healthy place when you and your partner just aren’t a good match; maybe you got married before you had any idea of what a good match would be. You won’t always be recognized at work; in fact, you may never be recognized at all. And while you may do your best to limit the costs of a decision, you end up paying those costs in some way you never anticipated.
That was the wound I lived in, for a long time. I met some friends there, and we lived in our wounds together. What seemed so easy for other people was proving difficult for us. Life simply wasn’t paying off, no matter how hard we worked (and we worked hard!) at our jobs and our relationships. The disappointment thrummed in our veins with each pulsating beat, each point of connection between us.
If resentment is birthed from disconnection, then I think reconnection begins with empathy. After all, empathy demands that we step outside of ourselves to walk in someone else’s shoes. We can’t stay in our wounds when we have to put ourselves in some other position, assume some other perspective. We must emerge. We must reach out to someone else by trying to understand their pain, their bitterness, their unfulfilled dreams and desires and needs, or their grief – even when they seem to have everything we ever wanted, or even when we hold them responsible for our pain. We must consider a situation from a different point of view.
It wasn’t until I struggled to manage divorce, job loss, my child’s rising needs, my new relationship, and unexpected addiction issues that I could move past anger to arrive at understanding and acceptance of how my parents dealt with the same situations under greater pressure. The implosion of my own life allowed me to work through my deep-seated fears that I would follow in my parents’ footsteps. This led to growing awareness of how I related to stress through anxiety, and how I could learn to break that neural-emotional circuit.
Empathy enables us to develop our own perspective by setting it aside to explore others. Once we create some distance from our own negative emotions, from our own wounds, we can turn them into sources of insight instead. We can learn from them rather than live in them. Our focus can then shift toward the things we may actually be able to influence: our overall mental and emotional health, our approach to the world, and the lenses through which we interpret our lived experience. This is how we forge a new connection to our sense of self, one that isn’t embedded in a wound.
I read somewhere that on the other side of resentment is a longing for love. Our resentments about how life has disappointed us are the dark side of our desire to feel loved, secure, valued, and appropriately recognized.
I think that when it comes to positive emotions, we tend to cast our nets in shallow water. We look to our job and wonder, Why hasn’t it fulfilled me yet? Or we turn to our partner and think, Will they ever make me happy? We sit back and cast a critical eye over our lives, thinking, When will my effort and sacrifice pay off? Why wasn’t I able to build the family I wanted? Why couldn’t I ever occupy that role? When will I become . . .?
Maybe we should cast a wider net out into deeper water. Maybe we should look for love, for things we value, for security everywhere around us rather than in one siloed-off area of life or another. If we don’t find our careers especially rewarding, so what? Maybe we can find sufficient good there and a great deal of good in another area of life; put them together and we’ll have plenty of good overall. If our partner isn’t proving to be everything we dreamed of, does it matter? Maybe our partners only need to prove to be someone who others can’t be, only meet some need that others can’t. Maybe if we actually look for those things we want everywhere rather than only in this area or that, we’ll find them. Collectively, they’ll be more than enough.
Here, I don’t mean “look for” in the sense of desperately trying to find someone or something to love us the way we imagine we want. I mean to simply look for love, period. Look for the good. Look for the fulfilling. Look for the way the universe, some benevolent life force, cares for us.1 Look at how things work out for us. Look at the freedom we’ve gained or the people who’ve helped or the opportunities that emerged or the wonderful chance to start over, once more, in life. To try again. To explore anew. Look for a smile, a kind word, our contribution to someone else’s success. Look for what we’ve participated in instead of what we’ve failed to receive.
Looking for love is an opening up to possibility. When we are driven to look for love around us, we are certain to find it in some shape or form because love is there, woven into the threads of life. Love is there, knit into the fabric of our days, our connections, our experiences. Each discovery of love acts as a drop to dilute that pool of suffering, to close that wound, to heal those cuts of disappointment, those slices of anger. The specific disappointments in one area of life will sting less because we won’t feel robbed entirely; we’ll have much in other areas of life to sustain us.
With love comes connection. This time, we connect to others not through our wounds but through the positive forces extending from a higher power that intentionally brings us into contact with others. Such forces lead things to work out, bring people together, nudge us down the path of growth and change. We’ll connect to others through the love we’ve cultivated in ourselves, washing away the resentment drop by drop.
One day, perhaps at midlife or perhaps later, we’ll look within and say, Look at how I grew, at how emotionally wealthy I am. Look at my friendships, my connection to my child, my relationship to my partner. See the sweetness in our touch. See the compassion I show myself and others, the satisfaction I’ve gleaned from looking within. Look at how I give and receive love. What a gift this life is – not mine to control or shape but mine to enjoy as it unfolds hour by hour, day by day.
Things won’t be perfect (we can count on that). But we won’t need them to be. We’ll have enough.
Life will be good enough.
For more essays trying to make sense of this life, see:
Obviously, thoughts about a benevolent life force are a belief in themselves – but I think they’re the sort of belief that underlies connection as opposed to resentment. I don’t much care whether there actually is such a life force or not; the idea of one gives me a place to mentally deposit my anxiety, which works well enough.
This was really lovely, thank you for sharing it.
I’m a lot better managing resentments than in the past (especially when I was drinking) but some days it’s a serious struggle. I don’t latch onto them as intensely as I used to at least.