You may know by now that I write poetry to help me process my feelings and have a bit of a laugh at myself. Bringing humour into my every day is a way to add some light skips into the heavy trudge that life can feel like when I am feeling uncomfortable emotions such as resentment.
Resentment can be a bit of a tricky trickster feeling because it starts off outward focussed, meaning that you can think that the problem lies at someone else’s feet. There is often an outside trigger which ignites the burn of resentment; we may resent those who are ‘not pulling their weight’, or resent the person who is has just been promoted.
It’s an umbrella emotion for a whole bunch of other spitting-feathers sentiments such as frustration, judgment and envy.
Yet although resentment is triggered by this comparison with others, when we feel it, we need to recognise that it is a signpost to where we are feeling deprived.
Resentful of that person not pulling their weight? We are feeling deprived of rest and support. Feeling the burn at that promotion just being handed out to a colleague? We are feeling deprived of recognition, opportunity and validation.
The word originates from the French "ressentir", re-, intensive prefix, and sentir "to feel", in other words, ‘to feel again’. When we feel resentment we are just churning over old negative thoughts with no action as sure enough, in the shadows of resentment lurks procrastination.
Unlike anger, a ‘fight’ type of emotion which can galvanise boundaries and change, resentment is a ‘freeze’ type of emotion, whirling around in our head or subconscious making us feel uneasy and victimised… remember the drama triangle from a couple of newsletters ago?
The way out of victimisation is to become a creator, to get curious. One way of doing this is to write a ‘shitty first draft’; this is a technique from Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird. Whilst this is a writing technique, it is a great technique for looking under the resentment umbrella to see what is there. After all,
‘Awareness is the greatest agent for change.’
Eckhart Tolle.
To write your own SFD start thinking about that resentful part of you; the bit that isn’t open to reason or perspective. And then…
Let
It
All
Out.
Don’t listen to any shoulds or shouldn’ts - you have to see your resentment in its full glory before you can understand what it is telling you.
Then after you have written your SFD, pick out the key words that are in there. Get familiar with what the resentments are saying because as you do so they can lose their power.
Then ask yourself what your role is within the resentment - what are you depriving yourself of, telling yourself what you ‘must’ do or what you ‘can’t’ have?
This will help you to explore what you need. It may be that you need to set a boundary with someone else or even yourself; admit you need help and support.
Then - and this may stick in the throat a bit at first - practice gratitude towards the person you are resentful of for helping you discover what you need or want.
What did my resentment which drove me to write the poem above reveal? My sense of inadequacy that I can feel about writing the poetry I write. What did I need? To give myself permission to write unapologetically; to write for me, with curiosity and playfulness and to set it out in the world without pressurising myself about how it is received; to recognise that I write, because I can not not!
Have fun writing your shitty first drafts!
That’s it for now,
‘Til next time.
Jacky x
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