Tween Blog and Resentment

I am now considering my blogs as tween blogs because they come tween Monica’s fun Friday blogs. After you read this one, you’ll need a good Friday blog! I’ve been thinking a lot about resentment lately and would like to share a story.

One day in chapel at OC a Dean of some sort from the Pepperdine Law School led some talk that went way over my head. At the end he said he would be in the Student Center on campus that afternoon for anyone interested in talking about the school. I was considering law school as an option at that point in my schooling, so I stopped by his little table that afternoon.

After I initiated the conversation, I finally asked him, “So how much does it cost a year to go to Pepperdine Law School?” He then responded with a straight face, “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.” No change of expression on his part, even though I briefly giggled because I thought it was a joke. When I finally realized he was being pompous and smug, I felt humiliated.

All I could think about for days was ripping the bow tie off his neck and feeding it to him as I shoved it down his throat. I thought, “I’ll show him…I’ll go to law school and show up in his class and be the best student ever.”  However, I knew inside that he would not even remember me and I would have felt terribly unfulfilled, which made me even more frustrated.

That man owned me and my thoughts for a long while, which is the best definition I’ve heard of resentment—to resent someone is to be owned by them. I was ready to do anything I could to show him up, to humiliate him, to beat the arrogance out of him. He owned me for several years. How could his one remark and his stupid bow tie cause so much humiliation and hate in me? I can come up with no better answer than I let him control me. I’m frustrated I let him own me for so long, but I have since let it go. Now on the other side of it, I can see how I let him influence and control me and how I don’t want anybody like that to have any ownership over me.

Who owns you right now? I have to admit I have some shareholders.