A Tamagotchi Full of Past Peeves

I do yoga. Not as in, I spend a fortune on fancy yoga pants and cute little bralettes my boobs spill out of anyway, just so I can force myself into positions that aren’t beneficial to anyone but, perhaps, a misguided Instagram-ready camera. I genuinely practice yoga, far beyond the asanas and the pranayama. I am by no means a self-professed yogi – not that I’m exactly sure what that even means. But I do honestly believe in the art of breathing lots of love in and lots of love out – as Adriene Mishler would say – and, most importantly, letting go of something that no longer serves me in the process. And while I’m not down with how the term namaste has been robbed of its meaning, I’m down with the concept of the light in me recognizing the light in you. But man, is it hard to recognize it when it’s so fucking dim.

I really do try to keep this kind of shittiness off the mat when I’m practicing, and I will – cross my heart and hope to die – do my very best to send love to those I feel diddly-squat for in that very moment. Once I’ve rolled all that goodness I cultivated on the mat back up into a tight little burrito though, I’m not ashamed to admit that some of those lingering, hot-fury spices come spilling out from either side again. They start bubbling up in the cauldron that is my gut – bubble, bubble toil and trouble, bitches! – and rise up to the forefront of my mind like a horrendous, but silent belch that totally befouls all that inner peace I just invited into heart and soul through a series of vinyasas and alternate nostril breathing.

So, suddenly I find myself leaning over the sink eating cereal for dinner, with past peeves lighting up the back corners of my brain with a light as garish as the fluorescent bulb in our kitchen. You know, recounting whole-ass conversations that still make my piss boil, five years on. Thinking about that incredibly tactless thing someone said around this time last year, and those inconsiderate stunts another pulled way back when, and how they still influence the way I feel about those people now. And instead of waving it all off and down by simply finding forgiveness for their fuckwadery, I use them as a source of masochistic entertainment, the way others might watch a crappy sitcom for company at dinner time.

Before I fully commit to relishing in the above moment a little – or a whole – while longer, I think about all the amazing people around me who insist they know how to let bygones truly be and stay bygones, who swear up and down that they know only to operate from a place of compassion and have erased the word hate from their emotional terminology. At this level of playtime, I go from feeling envious of their supposed maturity to feeling sorry for their lack of self-awareness – because no one can honestly tell me that they have never experienced the challenge that comes with the art of letting go, once and for all. It reminds me a little of  Chuck Klosterman’s Stereotypical Jesus in his series of “Hypertheticals”.

Let’s say you died and found yourself in the “clichéd kindergarten version of Christian Heaven” – you know, angels playing harps on fluffy white clouds, everyone going commando under soft-looking, white robes. “Everyone there is aimlessly walking around, smiling broadly, perfectly content; this, it seems, is how you will spend eternity.” And that’s when your Stereotypical Jesus appears. He welcomes you to his digs and an afterlife of unconditional love but, knowing that heaven isn’t for everyone, he offers you the opportunity to opt for “the other place”, should you so desire. He assures you that the other place of which he speaks is definitely not hell – “just another viable post-life option”. He won’t tell you what awaits you there, but you have twenty minutes to decide whether you’ll stay in heaven or open the door to the unknown; and if you choose the latter, you can never come back. So, what are you gonna do?

To me, this was never a difficult question. Does the fact that I have no idea what awaits me in the other “post-life option” scare me? Sure. But it’s nowhere near as terrifying as the thought of spending eternity walking around aimlessly and feeling forever content and not even being able to just drop dead and die of boredom. I cannot and will not believe anyone who tries to tell me that they’re 100% content, no matter how thickly they layer on those blessed hashtags on their foreheads and empty feeds, and I honestly can’t imagine what good it would do either. Finding purpose is what we thrive on, and whatever it is, it keeps evolving with us. A world in which humans are stripped of it is pretty much inconceivable – at least to me. So forgive me for not being down with this idea of heaven.

On some weird level, I’d like to be like the character Bonnie on HBO’s Big Little Lies: calm and collected, approachable, and always leading with my best intentions. Truthfully, however, I’m like Madeleine: “I love my grudges, I tend to them like little pets.” Every now and then, when I need something to excuse – or fuel – an already crabby mood, I’ll reach deep into my pockets of past peeves and put them back on my present shit-list, albeit for just a short moment. I think of it like playing with a Tamagotchi, only my weird little egg thing is home to all my grudges, and instead of tending to them with food, water and playtime, I go all Black Mirror on them, subjecting them to the kind of torture only a Cookie in the hands of Jon Hamm may know.

My husband – my infuriatingly non-conflicted voice of reason – often tries to remind me that letting go of the lingering anger I feel would liberate me, but to no avail. I know he’s right, and I know he’s not saying it to be a wiseass, or to downplay my feelings, but because he cares about me and doesn’t want me to get worked up over things – ok, people – I can’t change. I just can’t help myself. I try to channel the Bonnie energy – lead with compassion, understand that everyone has their own story, their own pain and shortcomings. I try to stay tuned into these interpersonal mantras in the heat of an actual moment. I still hold on to them whilst stomping through the quietly bubbling lava that still exists in my mind weeks, months, even years after the fact. But you know what? Sometimes I just can’t. And that’s alright.

Does that make me petty? Probably. Is it healthy? Probably not. Is it human? Certainly. Does it make for great fodder for a piece like this? Absofuckinglutely.