Living Well is the Best Revenge

21Feb09

Over the time I haven’t written here I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I’ve also been unconsciously wallowing in self-abasement, most notably since I started working at the naturopathic clinic (because I’ve been so preoccupied with it), regarding how much my life has slowed down since university, how my ambitions elude me, and how since then I’ve greatly struggled with the ugly faces of my idiosyncrasies, foibles, flaws, which I’ve always found myself unable to forgive, whether pointed out by others or recognized by me. That in itself, the inability to be forgiving of one’s own imperfections, is yet another flaw in my eyes.

However, one thing I’ve reminded myself of is that no one, as much as they may have even been the catalyst of the fears, insecurities, or neuroses, can actually make you have them or keep them. My interpretation or assumption of what people say or think is my choice alone. I can choose to let them judge, belittle, resent, abuse, accuse, or foster negative traits or I can choose to let the words, actions, and emotions be separate from me, and I can recognize what they truly mean, what they actually say about those people, and I can choose to let those negative things be actual favours to me: they can motivate me to be the opposite, to learn, to excel.  That is, to keep excelling.

Part of the frustration is that very fact — that it is solely my choice how people’s words, actions, and emotions affect me — but part is also that I’ve conveniently lost sight of that fact many times and thus spent far too much time reinforcing what others have said or done.

Where what I’ve said above becomes relevant

Yesterday was my 35th birthday. One of my sisters called me before I left for work to wish me a good day and also to let me know that someone had written a very venomous note on my Facebook wall and I might want to delete it. A while ago I’d deactivated my Facebook account (I’m annoyed one cannot actually delete one’s account, it seems) to simplify my life, let go of the past, and because I was always irritated by how long the thing took to load. It also seemed a waste of time; there were many “friends” and relatives I never spoke to or even had never met, notifications and comments on my wall that irritated me, and I am frankly not interested in the fact that so and so just watched CSI or had scrambled eggs for breakfast. I wanted more meaningful interaction.

But on reflecting one night, I thought perhaps it had been rude of me to deactivate my account, rude or selfish or snobbish, to cut off people who may have wanted to keep up with me that way. So I started a new account not much more than a week ago. I was reminded yesterday why I had deactivated it. The message of which my sister had spoken was indeed horrid but most of all bewildering. In addition, the person left a very long message in my inbox.

I know that what I’m going to write about the messages and their author will sound immature of me. I know that a bigger woman perhaps wouldn’t include it, and that it’s defensive of me to have to prove to you that her messages were simultaneously horrible and strange and that the author is very likely mentally unstable. Yet I’m choosing to write it anyway, thinking that while I might be childish in doing it, my intention is not to make fun of her to make me look the better woman. It’s to bring me properly to my conclusion. (Plus, you’re dying to know what the messages said, aren’t you?)

As much as the words were ridiculously untrue — (among many other asinine accusations such as that I apparently fake illness to bully and manipulate people, I think too much of myself, and my marriage is a failure because my husband [whom she has never met] is “emotionally dead,” she wrote that I am jealous I didn’t have her partner’s children [!?] — I, one who has never wanted children [regardless of which boyfriends and husbands] and who feels utterly confounded that one can believe that simply getting knocked up and having a kid means you are more of a woman [also see my post here]!) — and as much as they constituted a transparently desperate attempt to belittle me to aggrandize herself, they did indeed get to me. They festered in me all day, making me poisonously angry and resentful and regretful, and especially utterly and immaturely desirous of the last word and revenge. I’ve been “a Christian woman” (quoting Auntie Em here) more than enough times in my life, not deigning to answer the rantings of others. Alas, after this woman commented on my wall and in my inbox, she conveniently deleted her Facebook account as well as that of her partner. Cowardice, I’d wager, but perhaps also infantile in making sure she got the last word.

The comments that came in from friends and family who wondered about the message on my wall (one friend wrote, “What on earth is that horrid wall post all about?? It seems written by someone with a sketchy grasp of the language at best, not to mention someone who seems to lack those all-important qualities class and taste, integrity and self-possession…Good lord — she’s obviously not well”), and who would be ugly enough to write such things on my birthday, made me feel I was not alone in my impression of this person who confidently (and incredibly) professed that because she had a certain IQ she had me all figured out, although we’ve never met.

Her quite incoherent words, irritatingly written with an excessive use of capital letters, ellipses, and exclamation marks, misspelled words, and ludicrous statements, betrayed the person she truly is, an insecure and jealous woman who, in feeling the need to assert her dominance, actually stated her IQ (which as we all know is likely wholly inaccurate, as scientists readily admit IQ measurements are not reliable, nor do they really measure intelligence but rather more so logic), exclaim that she and her partner were going to be millionaires, and make a shopping list of my apparent shortcomings and wrongdoings, and jealousy of not having children, as well as continually contradict herself in significant ways, proved she was exactly the opposite of what she was attempting to suggest. An intelligent person does not go about stating how intelligent they are. A classy, educated, and truly confident woman does not call another woman “a silly arsehole of a broad,” or insist on her confidence and high quality, and nor does she have the gall to reference one of Eckhart Tolle’s books while utterly having missed the point of it. My first thought was actually that she was mentally unstable, and my second was that Buddha would not have been proud of her (she and her partner are supposedly Buddhists. Again, they’ve apparently missed the teachings there).

Wherein I get to the point

I fully realize how emotionally charged I sound above. And yes, since I couldn’t respond to her messages obviously meant to hurt me, I am venting a little here. But she ultimately made me frown while thinking of the many truths about me, let alone her, in juxtaposition to what she was saying.

And this is a good thing. She’s done me a favour, I realize. She’s pulled me out of my lamentations that I’ve done nothing with my life and am no good, uneducated, and have too many flaws, and ignited my defensive anger. It’s excellent, in this case, this defensiveness. Suddenly, I look back on my previous year, on my life in general, on my successes and my internal achievements (which I strangely don’t feel the need to list and lionize here ), on the definite truths about me that contradict her confounding accusations, but I am most of all glad to have never stooped as low as this woman has. Pharisee-ish of me, perhaps. But there it is, nevertheless. At least I recognize it. I never said I was perfect.

This morning I awoke remembering my last thoughts: that I’ve not at all done badly for myself, that I have made good decisions, that things have worked out for me, and that, ultimately — with my health and easy access to healing people and practices, with my excellent education and my ability and intelligence to think for myself and to write and read well — together with my husband to whom I must state I am indeed happily married, as I think you already know from previous posts, I am truly living well.

A good friend is visiting this weekend from Ottawa and after dropping my husband off in Trenton for his father’s birthday, while driving down the 401, squinting in the sun (sunglasses aren’t ready yet) and smiling at the person I’ve become from the woman who was scared to drive (let alone on the highway), I passed a car whose bumper sticker read, “Living well is the best revenge.” Ah. I grinned. Some reinforcement from the universe. And then some more when I got home and turned on Classical 96.3 and the presenter reported her Living Well segment.

As I sit here at our kitchen table beside vases of vibrant birthday flowers, in our warm and bright, sunny house we own (well, in a manner of speaking!), I smile again. Thinking on everything I’ve realized by looking at myself in a different light, I can truly let go of yesterday’s messages and rise above them with a newfound confidence in myself.

And that, I gather, is surely part of what living well really means.

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