The Ugly Origami of Resentment

You’re sitting there folding up a piece of resentment, making it nice and neat and tidy and compact.

You’ve had another interaction that went the same way many interactions go. The person was blaming you for things, or putting stuff on you, or questioning some part about you that you hold as especially important.

However it was, you’re folding your resentment up into a tight little package. If you can tuck the corners in, you can get it pretty tight and contained, and then you can stuff it down deep and bury it.

You’ve been doing this for a while now — probably ever since you were a kid, back when you were told that your anger was unacceptable, or possibly even after you learned from watching one or both of your parents and made that decision for yourself.

“I’m never going to be like that with my anger. That’s not only unproductive, it’s embarrassing... pathetic. Not me”.

So instead, you learned to fold your resentment up into a nice tight little bundle and bury it.

At first, carrying that resentment around was hard, but you made the decision to do so, because you were unwilling to be the same monster that you saw the rest of the world being. You would swallow your anger, and put on a mask of civility.

It was so costly at first because it was like introducing an impurity into a system without any.

The second time you did this was challenging too, but not as much. You were doubling the amount of resentment you were carrying, but you were also adding only half as much to the overall system as you did the first time, relatively speaking.

Over time, the amount of resentment you were burying, compared to what was already there, was less and less. After about thirty years each new piece of resentment was almost insignificant compared to the pile you were already carrying around. It paled in comparison. Adding it to the pile felt like no big deal.

As time has worn on, you’ve gotten better at folding up these little piece of resentment into tight light packages and filing them way, energetically. This is the area of your mastery.

It’s also the bottleneck in your leadership. You’ve sat with your coach and talked to them about this, explained how this works and it makes sense. It lets you get the job done, and people don’t have to be with your anger.

Your coach has been supporting you to see that sometimes what is required from a leader is their ability to own their anger. Sometimes, what is called for, in the moment, IS anger.

Instead, you have no option available but to sit there making nice little origami parcels of resentment and stuffing them. You walk around with a smile on your face and say all the words of civility, while people are left with the distinct impression that you will be very efficiently murdering them later on in the bathroom. (Don’t forget to wash your hands when you’re done).

These days, the task of folding up another piece of resentment and stuffing it internally seems much less daunting than does doing whatever work would be required to clear all of that mess out.

When resentment shows up, you take the “sensible” way, and stuff it. The problem is that this resentment has become like towering piles of paper, carefully but precariously organized inside of you. Each new piece of resentment tends to disturb the piles, and these days, more often than not, creates a huge mess. You’re no longer able to hold all of this energy, and people start to wonder why the slightest piece of irritation seems to cause you to blow up.

You’re kind of wondering the same thing.

Horrified at the anger you swore you would never visit upon others, your instinct is to try and stuff it down further. Maybe if you smile even harder at people after you hate their guts, that will help?

But it doesn’t.

It doesn’t help, because you are avoiding the opportunity to deepen your personal leadership in this moment.

It doesn’t work because the way out of this is not around your anger, or away from, or by avoiding it.

The way out is through.

Instead of adding to those piles, the way out is to let your anger unfold — to give it the space to open up and to be with everything that that entails. To let yourself not only experience your anger, but also express it.

“So what, I just spew fire onto the people around me?”

Great question! No, you do not do that. That’s what you’re already doing.

What you do is you find responsible ways to express your anger, and you practice. You set aside time to actually BE angry — not to think about your anger, or ask yourself WHY you’re angry (shaking your fist at the sky is optional), or to describe what makes you angry — to actually practice BEING angry.

Your coach has you practice screaming into a pillow, or punching one. Writing out the most hateful angry prose you can onto paper. Buying cheap plates and smashing them. Driving into the forest and screaming at the top of your lungs. The practice itself is less important than the act of you practicing expressing something you are otherwise unwilling to.

It feels silly at first. It feels forced.

It should.

It should feel forced because you are forcing it. What comes naturally to you, at this point, is to fold your anger up tightly and stuff it away somewhere that you don’t have to be with it. Doing anything other than the default is going to feel forced — at first.

But this isn’t something you have to take on faith. The impact of the way you’ve been doing things is starting to show through the cracks and in the world around you.

Are you willing to start practicing something different?