On letting your success be the best revenge

I am not necessarily one of those people who believe in an absolute ‘eye for an eye’. I have always been a pacifist and more of a ‘turning your cheek the other way even if they bite you on both side’ type of person.  However, when you get older and start to get out of your bubble of social circles more often, you would find yourself dealing with jerks and people you think may be the embodiment of an absolute evil spirit and you can’t help nurturing hatred or harboring desire to take revenge. You start realizing that maybe it’s not totally right to fault people for wanting revenge. When you start experiencing the extent of pain and how severe the damages caused by that evil person can be, you may find yourself realizing that maybe having the urge to take revenge is primal. It’s a quest for vigilant justice that is normal to materialize within individual when whatever existing justice-generating mechanism deemed fail to fulfill their sense of retribution as a victim. 

Maybe its not totally immature after all, to keep entertaining the thought of a certain cheating or oppressive jerk that you know of to choke on some of the humiliation for once. To keep nurturing the hope that one day they would also suffer the exact horrible emotional pain they have caused upon you. To hang around waiting on Mother Karma to whack them on their balls in case she needs any help.

I’ve always had this habit of justifying bad actions that people do in life and upon me. I’ve always tried to first understand where they’re coming from, their background, and deduce some form of rationalization on why they decided to commit their evil acts to begin with. (like maybe they were also the victim of past injustices. maybe their family doesn't treat them well, maybe they were ALSO betrayed before). And I am pretty good at it too.  In debate, I am so used to justifying certain acts that is deemed as ‘absolute evil’ by most average people even if that may go against my own moral compass.  Basically trying to insert compassion however I could whenever I feel wronged by someone.

Forgiving has always come easy for me. Until more and more human I come across in life start to unleash the true potential on how evil a human being can be. It’s just plain upsetting. Its’ like your whole belief that human is inherently good until evil externalities come to force them to be bad is shaken to its core. How can a person become capable of doing such things? How could they do it so easily? It’s like human’s heart and sincere trust mean so little to them. From cheating on significant others to manipulating your vulnerabilities to being a complete irresponsible douche who jeopardize your whole community, I find it harder and harder to forgive and let alone justify shits people have done. Especially when the damage creates specific and disproportionate harms for myself.

My emotions usually go from, “Please don’t do this. Did I do something wrong?” to, “How could you?!” “I hate your guts! Get out and I hope you burn in hell!” to, “I feel nothing. I feel numb. I don’t care what you do.” But then it sometimes goes back to gruesome fantasies of them burning in hell or of me kicking them on their balls. Repeatedly.

Basic psych advice would usually tell you that the best form of revenge are to exactly move on and build some sort of indifference to show them you are high above them and they don’t matter. But people don’t shake off their emotional pain like they put antiseptic on a cut, you know. Scariest thing about feelings is that it lasts. It doesn’t just go away. its a freaking long process you need to acknowledge and go through maybe for the rest of your life. The only thing you can do to contain it is by somehow transforming it into a modified and less destructive form. And its okay to not be nice sometimes. Its okay to hate someone and wanting to get revenge for once. Its just a question on how you best designing your form of revenge understanding that completely forgiving them, moving on and letting it go is physically impossible for you to do at the moment.

Its already tough being a victim. Especially when claiming victimhood isn’t guaranteed due to the complexity of your issues or even the extent of ignorance of the society you are living in. So it should be fine for you to preserve the hatred for while until you are able to transform it into something else. And its also okay if it takes some time until you can transform or even get rid of it. Its fine if you don’t completely suppress your thirst in having a revenge. Having negative feelings and thoughts along the way to a healthy recovery is important. That’s why I sometimes regret the over glorification of positive-thinking. You dont owe anyone to be happy-go-lucky all the time. You are allowed to grieve and hate and loathe. Channel all those hatred, anger, and negative energy to keep doing your best in your work. Turn them into hours of routine workout, pages of research papers, mountains of debate trophies. Whatever float your boat. Whatever you wanna gloat. If you have this urge to remind them how much of  a loser they are you show them by being a much better human being than they are. if you happen to find that you both are losers (especially during one of those  depressive episodes), you find ways to prove that at least you are a more accomplished loser than they are. However that may be. 

**Artwork belongs to its Artist