Bitterness Blinds And Stagnates Us
Recently, I discovered I had become somewhat bitter. People have been exiting my life suddenly and unexpectedly. Some left through death, others through job changes, and some are moving across the country. The sneaky thing about bitterness, though, is that I didn’t even realize I was affected by it. It struck me one day because someone I know was upset about something in her life, and in my mind I was condescending, thinking that she had nothing to complain about—it wasn’t as bad as what I had to deal with. I don’t like admitting that because it’s so awful, but it was startling to me that I had not noticed where my thoughts were trending until that point. I knew I had been thinking similar things for a length of time, and not once had I considered that there was something off about it.
Bitterness makes us compare our situations and circumstances with others’, minimizing their struggles because we think our own are more significant in some way. However, in “Man’s Search for Meaning,” an autobiographical novel by Viktor Frankl, he argues that suffering is entirely relative. Reading that book was an assignment for one of my classes, and it was humbling because his is a story of survival in the concentration camps. He analyzed the psychology of prisoners when they were first imprisoned, when they settled in to the apathy of camp life, and later, when they were liberated. He observed that once liberated, many prisoners suffered from bitterness and disillusionment, and they felt they had the right to stomp through fields of crops and do whatever they pleased in light of what had been done to them. Frankl wrote, “Only slowly could these men be guided back to the commonplace truth that no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.” In my own bitterness, I did not stomp through fields of crops, but I stomped down my compassion for others and withheld sympathy.
Instead of bitterly degrading others, we should seize opportunities to persevere and grow in strength and empathy. Bitterness blinds us to such opportunities and causes us to remain stagnant in our personal development, nudging us toward a disagreeable path. Suffering and grief are unique to each individual and should never be minimized. Others’ struggles in life provide us with the chance to reach out and become better people as we attempt to ease their pain. It is in this solidarity that humanity finds completion.
