I used to take absolute joy in crushing my enemies and destroying people who have wronged me. I was also very, very good at it. If somebody was deserving of my wrath, I would do almost anything to make it happen. I would call in favors long forgotten. I would orchestrate any needed scenario. I would facilitate any action. I would pay any price. And while I'm not saying I would ever be the cause of any physical harm, my vengeance could be terrible and have horrifying consequences for anybody who dared to screw me over.
But then one day after a particularly nasty revenge scenario, I realized the only person I was hurting was myself.
Ha ha... just kidding. That's lame.
Actually what happened was that I took a moment to do a victory dance after a particularly nasty revenge scenario and suddenly realized I was genuinely afraid of myself.
The person who was capable of what I had done was not somebody I wanted to be.
Which means that I actually was hurting myself after all. Which is still lame, but at least it's lame for a cool reason.
That was twenty years ago, give or take.
Since that time, I've had exactly one relapse.
I'd like to say that I'm not proud of what I had done, but that would be a total lie. The only thing I'm proud of is that I didn't go any further than I did. Because, heaven only knows, they certainly would have deserved it.
But I didn't deserve to have to live with it.
Except now I've been working my guts out while catching up on the past couple episodes of ABC's Revenge starring the brutally hot Emily VanCamp, and I'm starting to have second thoughts...
On television, everybody is having a great time dishing out wrath and vengeance.
That could totally be me!
All I have to do is sit back and wait for somebody truly deserving to come along. Given my luck, they'll be here soon enough.
Darnit anyway.
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I absolutely love “Revenge.” I get to see Emily do things that I wish I could do. The things I think about and then say to myself, “Hey. What about taking the higher road? You can’t do this. And what about the threefold law? Are you really ready for your actions to come back on you karmically?” Because yeah, I spend a lot of time thinking about the energy that I put out into the universe. Seriously. It’s what happens when you grow up outside of Berkeley. That and how to realign your chakras.
Well, you could always do revenge for hire, you’d have to do better job than they did in Dirty Work.
I think you made the right call 20 days ago.
Yep – it’s easy to be vengeful when you’re younger and you know it all. I was that way, too – until I lived through a whole shitload of life that taught me the same thing it taught you – who wants to be that person?
Sometimes, I still do want to be that person, though.
I guess I’ll have to watch that show!
Many years ago, I found your blog by doing a search for Veronica Mars (and you’d just posted about your love for the show.) I’ve been here ever since.
I love that we’re still jazzed by the same TV shows, all these years later. LOVE Revenge. Nolan’s my favorite. Poor Nolan. I want to be his friend, because he seems to have none, and he’s really kind of awesome.