Bitter is a choice

What does it mean to be bitter? It seems it’s kind of a mix of feelings – sad, angry, resentful, thinking like life hasn’t been fair to you or to your people.

Bad stuff happened and we feel like we didn’t deserve it and maybe  we really didn’t, but it happened  anyway. How are we gonna handle it? We can resent it for a while and for sure we probably will, but do we want to keep thinking about it, keep holding on to it?  If we keep that up, we just continue to lose. It’s bad enough already, but if we let it change our lives, we’ve really lost out.

Giving up the resentment and moving forward  really does make us stronger. It kind of pulls us together inside and says that we’re tougher than that and that even though we know it wasn’t right, wasn’t what we wanted, we know our life is bigger.

It’s a choice – not an easy one. We can accept what happened and move on, but then we might feel like we’re giving up that self-righteous feeling anger gives us. Or maybe we don’t want to accept it because that feels like we’re saying that what happened was ok when we know IT WASN’T. But being bitter just keeps us stuck there. We can be angry or disappointed without staying stuck, otherwise it just keeps  hurting. Once was enough, why keep it going?

Sometimes It seems like bitter people just want to lash out and have kind of a temper tantrum and  punish others with their anger because they were treated badly and didn’t get heard  by people the first time around. Ok, but  does that help?

You can keep holding on to it OR you can accept it and– decide to move on. It happened. You can choose to just  get on with your life. Can you think of any reason why not?