My Grudges

~ Clarissa

I hold no grudges against people I know but I have intense, very long, unrelenting fits of rage against being mistreated by authority.

For instance, today I went all out to help a colleague who’s been nothing but shit to me for years. I sincerely don’t care that he’s lousy to me. It’s on him. I can’t be bothered to notice.

I discovered that somebody at work hates me and is spreading really crazy, vile rumors about me. This piece of news bores me so much I keep forgetting it. It gets comical when I meet the hater in the hallway, vaguely remember that I recently heard something about her and make an exaggeratedly happy face to conceal that I don’t remember what it was. Then I notice her outraged gaze and remember that what I recently heard was that she detests me.

However, that one single time when I had to wear a mask in the classroom – I’ll hold that grudge close to my heart forever. On my dying bed I will burn with indignation over it. Because it was done to me against my will.

There’s no chance I’m ever getting over a single lie I heard on the news, the “anti-racist books” we were forced to read against our will, the COVID lies. Twenty lifetimes are not enough to get over it.

Often, people are the other way round. They obsess over a single unintentional snub from a friend or an ignored text message from a relative but have no anger to spare over having to walk around in a face diaper for two years or having to inject some weird crap to be able to eat at a restaurant.

We should be kinder to each other and a lot less kind to institutions, organizations, agencies, and authorities.

Published by Clarissa

10 thoughts on “My Grudges”

  1. Similar here. This puzzles me, about people generally. I am a totally, pathologically honest person. I don’t lie. The flipside of that is: lie to me once and if I find out, I will never, ever trust you again, no matter how trivial the lie was– I can’t let it go. I was incredibly lucky to find a husband who is also compulsively honest.

    I understand not liking me, and I definitely wouldn’t hold that against you. Lots of people can’t figure out how to deal with me, I rub people the wrong way because I’m lousy at social signaling and I don’t care where they are in their little hierarchies– I can’t read status, so I fail to defer to the “right” people. It confuses them. That’s life. I don’t blame them. Whatever.

    But there’s almost no worse thing you could do to me than force, manipulate, wheedle, or otherwise maneuver me into a position where I have to do what you want, against my own will and judgement. Convince me it’s the right thing to do, so that I comply voluntarily? Fine. Try to social-pressure me into it against the actual evidence? Ha! I don’t do social pressure. “Just check the tickbox so we can get this over with”? You’re asking me to perjure myself. You can go straight to hell. Force me to do what you want by guilting and/or threatening me? Well… this is why my relationship with my mom is so screwed up. If total strangers think they’re going to do better with the same tactics… um.

    So the whole mask/shots thing remains completely baffling. Did people just not look at the evidence? Are there way more people into BDSM in this country than I ever imagined, such that they enjoy being threatened and made to do inadvisable things? I feel like it’s normal to be volcano-level angry about being lied to, forced into stuff you don’t want to do, threatened… no? Why isn’t half the country out in the streets? Why haven’t there been any defenestrations yet?

    What I’m seeing around me is that it’s normal to simply defer to people of higher status, and tell yourself whatever you have to tell yourself, in order to evade your conscience about it– that’d be fine if perceived status was a function of, say wisdom, competence, or virtue, but it isn’t. It’s perceived material success. And… TV news has figured out how to hack that feature. The people who read you the news onscreen are dressed, groomed, accessorized, coached to project confidence, and choreographed to project status. They don’t actually own those clothes, didn’t compose what they’re reading from the teleprompter (which was written by low-status lackeys in the back office), and the jewelry is on loan from the local Nordstrom’s… but it doesn’t matter to whatever primitive brain-function detects that stuff. People see them onscreen, detect “higher status than I” and go on autopilot. It’s creepy.

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    1. Thank you for this comment. I have spent my whole life – and it’s no exaggeration – not being able to comprehend why people are so eagerly, subserviently, pathetically compliant. Even when there’s no penalty for non-compliance. How do they justify it in their own heads? How is it ok to lend yourself for mistreatment and abuse?

      It’s a lonely place to be and I’m very happy whenever I meet anybody who gets it.

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      1. “How do they justify it in their own heads?”

        I wish I understood this better. But at the same time, I’m not sure I’d want to peek into anybody else’s skull and watch that process. It scares me.

        But I think it works the same way as alpha dogs humping other male dogs to establish dominance. The other dogs still hang out with them. Hierarchy has been established. No hard feelings. There’s no mystery about it when animals do it. But watching human beings do this is… (shudders). It’s like they’ve abdicated free will.

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  2. “We should be kinder to each other and a lot less kind to institutions, organizations, agencies, and authorities.”

    These entities are like the grass. Bureaucrats like Fauci and politicians like Trudeau are the snakes.

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  3. “We should be kinder to each other and a lot less kind to institutions, organizations, agencies, and authorities.”

    Not enough pixelated thumbs pointing up on the internets to do this justice.

    I’m in a bit of hot water myself for this one

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  4. “We should be kinder….”

    This has been nagging me for two days now, because there’s something John Holt said, that I can’t quite remember, and DuckDuck is not helping, but he was talking about schools, and it was something to the effect of that because institutions exist to serve the needs of individuals, the individual should never be sacrificed to the needs of the institution, but rather the institution should always be sacrificed for the needs of the individual.

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    1. haha! In poking around trying to find the exact quote, I see that Holt had our current predicament nailed to the wall back in the 60s. Have you ever read any of his books? He was very influential (I think) on John Taylor Gatto, and IIRC you’ve read at least a little of his work.

      But maybe it wasn’t Holt after all. Maybe it was Illich. I’m bummed I can’t find it, but I see I need to re-read both of them…

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    2. This is also the definition of totalitarianism, by the way. It sacrifices individuals to institutions. The collective is always bigger and more important than the individual. That’s why totalitarian regimes destroy all original thinking and art. Groupthink doesn’t produce beauty. Or knowledge.

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