What do you do with anger and bitterness? How do you move forward to prioritize joy?
Feel the anger and bitterness to the awful depths that you can. Gotta go through it to get through it.
For me it felt like it never went away, because there is always some life bullshit that can spark it. The only thing that really made me eventually not obsess over those awful feelings, was thinking about it so much, agonizing over it to hyper focused levels, and suffering in my own mind so much until I overanalyzed those feelings to death…
Then once I got bored with feeling those things and thinking about them, in a flash on a random Tuesday I would be like “huh. I guess I’m over it now.”
It’s frustrating there was never more control I could wield over those things. But I find the situations that caused bitterness and anger are the things I had to learn not to be bothered by. It wasn’t about the causes or the situations–those were just tests and examples. The concept of mastering my own mind and emotions was the thing. I always believed in fake it ’til you make it, and actualizing our own desires, and truly the only thing that worked for me was if I ever wanted to feel joy or peace or whatever….I had to just feel those things. Like somehow manufacture what I would imagine those good feelings like joy would feel like, and then method-act my way into believing it and experiencing it.
If you don’t know a particular feeling, imagine other things that you think would make you feel that thing…and then just replicate it. The mind is a powerful thing.
Use it to your advantage to prioritize whatever you want. Sometimes that means you have to stop other things cold turkey, to make room for the new. But only with unyielding priority in ourselves can we make miracles happen.
Unfortunately for people like me that like having closure on everything, it makes it hard to quit bad habits just abruptly like that. But if you want peace, you can’t focus on being “anti” the thing you don’t want. You just have to not give any attention to adverse things you don’t want, and redirect all your energies to what you do want to feel, or experience, etc. What you focus on you create more of.
