The Revenge Driven Life
Getting revenge is like chasing big stones of offense down the steep hill of life every time anyone does you wrong, retrieving them as they coast to a stop in a ditch, then pushing them as you huff and puff back up the steep hill. While you’re busy doing this, golden opportunities are ahead of you that you can’t get to because you’re using all your energy to push these big stones back up a steep hill. In the meantime, all your relationships are abandoned, neglected and abused, because your focus is on getting back up the hill with your current huge stone. Frequently you lose control of the big stone and it rolls around and back down the hill. Then all the lives behind you, your dependents, family and friends, are run over. But you’re too focused on your stone of revenge to notice their pain, and how your quest for vengeance is blocking their way up the hill.
Of course, no one can keep pushing a big stone up a steep hill all by themselves. You get tired, so you force the people around you to push and pull your stone of revenge up the steep hill. By virtue of their marriage or birth they are forced to accept your priorities and chase your stone back down the hill, and push it back up the hill. Time and time again they are forced to do this as they watch their friends, relatives, and classmates move on up ahead, maturing and becoming stable, productive members of society, while they hurt inside, becoming classless, hard-bitten, bitter and desperate. Every now and then one of them will lose their focus on you and selfishly try to get you to pay attention to something that’s important to them. This enrages you intensely. You don’t care what they want. You don’t want to hear about their dreams, concerns, needs or fears. After all, you’re what matters. It’s your need for revenge and anger and bitterness that must be constantly attended to. There is no time or energy or money for anything else and if any of them forget that for even a minute you ignore them, abuse them and shame them. They soon learn to keep silent in the face of their own depression and feelings of being left behind. Their silence is comforting to you. You convince yourself that where there is silence there is no pain or fear or needs.
In the meantime, the many people who you took offense at are moving steadily up the hill without any cumbersome big stones, putting so much distance between you and them that you may never be able to reach them. Even if you do manage to reach them, by the time you do you’ll be a worn out, angry and bitter person, lacking in all good things and pathetic to look at. You’ll look at the good life they have. You’ll see their well kept lives. You’ll see their love for God, themselves and each other and be overcome with envy. With a heart full of hatred you’ll fling every stone you have at them. But they won’t chase any of your stones down the hill. They simply forgive you and continue tending to their homes and those around them. Suddenly you realize that you are totally impotent to do or say anything that will change the fact that they have done better with their lives than you did with yours. You will realize that if you had all they do you wouldn’t be so miserable. You’ll then blame all the sorry people who sacrificed years of their own lives dealing with you. You’ll look at them and tell them how disappointed you are in them, how inadequate they are to meet your needs. You’ll tell them how ashamed you are of them, and how because of them your life was wasted.
Later on, when the people around you finally stop accommodating your bloated sense of self importance by telling you how much you hurt them and how your behavior ruined years of their lives, you’ll rant and rave that you thought all was well. You’ll forget that you forced the silence that made you feel better about remaining constantly focused on yourself and your need to get even with everyone for every real and imagined offense. You’ll forget that you never cared about their problems and didn’t want to hear about them. You’ll forget that every time your spouse or one of your children or anyone opened up to you, you shut them down with anger, rage, shame and abandonment. You’ll remain as deluded as you ever were. You’ll see yourself as the victim of everyone else’s mistreatment and ingratitude. They just never cared about you like they should have. If only you could pay them back for how they hurt and disappointed you. If only you could get back at them somehow, you would.