I learned something new about myself last week in therapy.

I had been nervous and anxious about going to my session this particular week. I really only get this way when I try to bring up something that I’m ashamed of, or that I’m already secretly judging myself for doing. See, if there was one thing that I’ve learned being in therapy for the past 5 and a half months, it’s that it’s better if I’m being completely honest to myself, about myself, and with myself. I have to remind myself on these days that therapy isn’t a place of judgment, it’s a safe space to talk out these thoughts without feeling like I’m the stupidest person in the world.

In this particular session, I told my therapist about some behavior I found myself doing during certain moments of my day; many of them were when I felt a lack of control of my own life and the situations surrounding it that may not be in my control. I was glad she didn’t stare at me like I had 15 heads but bringing this certain thing up (which I will like to keep private for now) caused me having to bring up other things that I honestly haven’t thought about in a while.

It’s no stranger that I had a very dark past a couple of years ago. I share that part of my life to not just help other people overcome similar struggles, but for me to overcome it myself. A lot of the issues I carry on in my everyday life stem from various places within that time: I avoid confrontation like the goddamn plague, I am afraid of being assertive, and I easily dissociate whenever things get bad between me and people in general. While it’s not hard for me to talk about that part of my life because I took responsibility in playing bad parts of it, I still find it hard to forgive myself for my actions to this very day. It’s painful to reflect and it’s extremely hard not to be full of regret. Half of that reason was that I’m just naturally extremely hard on myself, the other half is because I never got proper closure, and probably never will.

I guess you can say that I hold onto grudges against everyone that was involved in that time of my life.

In general, I always thought I held onto grudges. I seemed to be the person that never ended things in a good way. When things got messy and rough and too much for me to handle, I vanish. I leave people behind without explanation and act like they never existed. I lived my life like this because I always thought I was forgettable; I was nothing special to remember. But doing that never left me feeling good; it just leaves me with painful memories and regrets and shame that I quickly have to get over before I dive into the “I fucking hate myself” part of my brain.

I reminded my therapist that the grudge I keep currently reminds me a lot about the one I kept since my dark past: Both dealt with people who were narcissistic, selfish, toxic, and manipulative. Both people left me in a state of loneliness and sadness, yet didn’t recognize the damage they have caused. The person from the past never apologized for putting me in a state so far in depression I was ready to kill myself. The person in my life currently never apologized for their behavior and hurting my family and myself. Because of that, I cannot “forgive and forget”. I cannot excuse the behavior and manipulation for pure “sickness and immaturity”. I cannot see them as good, changeable people anymore.

“Well, that’s not holding a grudge, Liz. That’s feeling resentment towards these people.”

What the fuck was the difference? Wasn’t being resentful just as equally bad as holding grudges? I didn’t know if my therapist was just trying to comfort me or spit out some true facts at me, but I was left confused. I asked her how are they different? Aren’t they both just as bad? Aren’t they both negative things I don’t wanna have to keep feeling?

“Holding a grudge and being resentful are two different effects that can come from a similar background. From a psychological standpoint, holding a grudge typically occurs when a person has owned up to their wrongdoings and took responsibilities for their actions in treating you unfairly, and perhaps you’ve forgiven them, but you never really will forgive them for what they did, no matter how much they’ve proven to be better people now. Being resentful is when the person who treated you unfairly never apologized or took into consideration that their actions affected you in any way, even if they changed for the better or don’t reflect the type of person they were during the time they treated you poorly.

You’re resentful, which isn’t such a bad thing to be. You may not completely see it now, but you’re acknowledging your self-worth and showcasing assertiveness by being resentful. You demand an apology when someone has disrespected you or has done something to negatively affect you in some way because you know you deserve it. Because many people are not willing to swallow their pride in order to take on such big responsibilities like that, you don’t wait long for that apology. Hence, you feel resentment towards the people who treated you unfairly.”

I was in complete shock. It explained so many things about my life and myself that I was never able to answer. Why did I allow people to hurt me to the point of no return? Why wasn’t I ever able to talk things out with people in my past and move past those wrongdoings in our lives? Was it really me running away to avoid confrontation or did I always knew how much I really deserved out of people and out of life in general? I thought I was always the bad person for “holding grudges”. I thought I was petty or spiteful if I still felt negative things about a person way after things changed or after I moved on. Why would these random people, who I do not miss having in my life whatsoever, bring me some sort of post-trauma? Why would those things that happened to me all those years ago influence how I resolve issues with people in general? Am I now a bad person for constantly running away from people, and pretend they never existed? Am I only hurting myself in the end?

I’ve realized that I had no control in “holding my grudges”, which is why I always thought I was this horrible person. I couldn’t see past all the harassment, manipulation, and threats. I couldn’t see past the catalyst for my major depression and suicidal thoughts. I simply couldn’t forgive.

But what is there to forgive if nothing was ever apologized for?

And that’s where it clicked. 

I left my therapy session feeling a lot better than how I entered it. It had felt like I lifted six years of weight off of my shoulders and I was finally able to breathe again. In a sense, I was also able to lift my current resentment towards family off of my shoulders as well. I was able to be okay to feel the way I felt about these two separate situations, and it was okay for me to move on without feeling like I’m this “petty” person for not forgiving people who never apologized for hurting me or abusing me verbally and mentally. People who never took responsibility for their actions and never apologized for heir behavior is not worthy for you to just drop it and act like nothing happened. At the end of the day, you are not wrong for still being resentful towards a person who has hurt you and never cared about/acknowledged the fact that you were mistreated. 

We tend to forget that people are actual fucking human beings; we forget that we all have real human, complex emotions that have opinions and thoughts about everything in life. When we unintentionally hurt people, we have to know how it feels to be in their shoes. You have to see things their way and ask yourself what was it that made them upset or mad at you in the first place. We then get a sense of the idea of what made them feel this way, and we apologize for unintentionally hurting them. No one is ever not going to apologize for unintentionally hurting someone unless you don’t plan on seeing things through the other person’s eyes. If you can’t sit back and reflect on your actions toward that person and think how it made them felt, you aren’t going to feel like there’s a reason to apologize. And that’s when resentment builds. If you would like someone to apologize to you when you are hurt, apologize to the people that you’ve hurt.

Just how being selfish with yourself doesn’t make you an asshole, feeling resentful because you know you’re worthy for apologies isn’t selfish. It’s wanting what you give back. It’s about getting respect. It’s about being honest and truthful and doing the right thing in situations.

I know the people in my life who I resent will never offer me any type of an apology, and I’m okay with that. I’m okay knowing that there are people who will acknowledge and apologize, and others will ignore and move on. I’m a resentful person, and as of now, I am happy that I am. I am still learning how to pick all the weeds and keep the flowers like Kelly Clarkson once said! I am allowed to hold resentment towards people who’ve hurt me the most, but I also know when to move on and start prioritizing my needs and my self-worth. Maybe part of my process right now is being resentful.

Be kind, but be assertive for your respect. You deserve it just as much as the next person, Y’all.

 

-Liz. (:

2007.

I knew I wasn’t someone who nobody liked. I had a really cool group of friends in 7th grade, and every day seemed like it was a new adventure being a 13-year-old girl. Girls liked boys, Girls like girly things, Girls constantly chased boys if boys were bugging them. Me? I fell into those categories, but one thing that I had that nobody else in my class had was something I was insecure about. No, it wasn’t my weight that people poke fun of occasionally.

It was the fact that every sixth period, I was pulled out of class for speech therapy.

Since I was a pre-schooler, I was put into speech therapy because I had a hard time speaking properly and I stuttered a lot. Speech therapy, in a sense, forced me to speak and try to formulate sentences that other people were able to understand. In the 5th grade, I remember having to explain something thoroughly in a game of Taboo, which I was surprisingly good at as a 10-year-old. I didn’t know, though, that speech therapy was now something I had to go through in middle school: the years where people poke fun at anything that seemed abnormal to preteens.

I remember my class sucking their teeth in music class everytime I was pulled out of class. I remember the days when I was able to attend music class, my music teacher pointed out that “Elizabeth has been out of class for half the year and she still knows more about her part on flute than the entire class.” It was humiliating. 

Although I was a pretty outspoken pre-teen, I still never felt like I was heard. I wasn’t remembered. I was just the girl who had a bunch of guy friends who seemed to only be friends with my tomboy best friend at the time. No boys liked me or paid attention to me like they did with the skinny girls, despite me having the hugest crushes in middle school. In a group of skinny girls, I felt like the ugly fat friend. It seemed like people only listened to me when I was singing on stage, to which then everyone took the time to notice me as Liz and not just another girl in the super smart class.

I noticed a couple of girls in my class occasionally write and share the poems that they would write, and somehow that interested me. How can these girls that everyone mistaken as “stupid girly-girls” write so sophisticated and… real? I decided to then try writing a poem on my own. It was called “You Found Me”. I shared it with those girls the following day at lunch, and for once, I felt heard.

2012.

I regret not putting sunblock on my body when ditching school for “senior ditch day”. High-school was officially coming to an end in a couple of weeks, and what not better way than to spend it with my friend and her circle of friends at a beach? I came home as red as a tomato. I know that’s so unoriginal for me to compare my skin with, but it’s the honest damn truth. Other than that, I had a good time. In a sense, I needed a day away from the drama that lived inside that school. For a performing arts school, you would’ve thought everyone majored in drama because everyone was in someone else’s drama. I had a lot of it in the recent months in 2012. For once, I felt unsafe at my school; I felt like a ticking time bomb and at any given moment, I was going to explode. I didn’t know who was watching me, talking about me, being fake towards me, but it felt like I heard something new about myself every single day.

Up to this point, my nights have all ended in me crying on my bathroom floor, feeling alone as one does at 3am in the morning. I spoke to God a lot, even though at the time it was very hard to believe in him when he had me in a situation I thought I’d never see myself coming out of. This particular night felt different; I thought for once I’d be able to sleep without any lingering thoughts in my mind.

Of course, that little hope only lasted for a few.

I received a phone call that frightened me. It was one that was intrusive, disrespectful, and manipulative as hell. To this day I still think about it. I hung up the phone afraid, hurt, and in shock. My actions as a dumb and naive 18-year-old got me to the point where it was now affecting those around me. It was my fault everyone around me was now involved. Most importantly, I hung up the phone defeated.

Sometimes I remember that night and think that was the night I didn’t want to live anymore. I think that night or that morning perhaps would’ve been when I’d attempted suicide for the first time. At that point, I didn’t feel like there was any way out of the torment I was living. I didn’t have much fight left in me. I think I remember that night so lividly because deep down I know that it easily could’ve been the night I gave up living.

I did what I did best at that time of my depression: I wrote a poem simply entitled, “Elizabeth”.

I posted that poem on my Facebook page as a note and tagged all of the “poetry people” who enjoyed reading my poems. In a sense, I wanted people to care and pay attention to me for once, I wanted someone to read that shit and read in between the lines and realized the little-hidden messages of me wanting to kill myself, I wanted a human-fuckin-being in this world to care that I fucking exist.

They felt the “hurt” in that poem, but I was nothing more than just an angsty teen who wrote poetry to express their overly-dramatic emotions. Still, it was enough for me to go to sleep that night and wake up the following morning. Knowing that I’ve written my truth and what I’ve feared for months on end was enough for me to see another day. I still remember that night.

2018.

To say it as bluntly as possible: I was fucking nervous. Sitting in the front row of the lecture hall with my name around my neck was nerve-wracking to me. Presenting in front of people was never my thing, especially if it was on something that I actually gave a damn about. This presentation was different than all the others I’ve done in my grad-school career. I was now only weeks away from graduating with my master’s, and here I am, presenting my 40-page Master’s Thesis for the annual graduate research conference. I had 5 minutes to present the work that I’ve done within the last 5 months, and again, it was extremely nerve-wracking.

I was number three, and the first of the English majors to present on the research that I made. This was it, as I stood up in front of the podium, looking at the small audience and my thesis advisor who walked in just in time to see her student present the body of work she helped me on. I was never the greatest academic writer; getting A’s on final papers in college was never an easy task, and they always came when it was about creative writing: my specialty. Taking my first ever graduate-level writing course changed the way that I saw writing and how it is viewed through a scholar’s perspective. Writing my thesis took two years to complete, and submitting it officially a week before the conference was an emotional roller coaster, to say the least. I mean, I cried the night I had it officially printed out for review if that gives you a picture on how much this thesis meant to me. 

It was now time for those who didn’t know me or my studies to know the exact things I was passionate about.

As a student myself, it’s important to be a part of an academic community that allows students to be themselves in their classes. Classrooms aren’t just lectures anymore; they are writing workshops and student-driven discussions. All voices are important, and they need to be recognized and heard more in college classrooms.

The five minutes were now up, and my last presentation as a grad student was officially over. I looked up to the people clapping and felt this immense feeling of accomplishment in me. For something I questioned myself doing in months prior has become one of the days I’ll never forget in my grad school career. People came up to me afterward and congratulate me on my presentation. Some even expressed their interest in one day reading my Master’s Thesis! I thanked my thesis advisor for helping me and encouraging me to be heard on a topic that is important not just in English classrooms, but any type of classroom where professors are authorized more than students. I left my student career doing the one thing I’ve wanted to accomplish in all 6 years of college: to be heard.

 

-Liz. (: