How to punish the people who wrong you
that's a question, does anyone know
I’m dissolving “Chump of the Week,” although its mission will live on. I don’t like the idea of having multiple “columns” in this Substack. It’s unwieldy to me, and I think it makes more sense to just have one regular roundup column, and then occasional standalone posts that can be gripes about my life or whatever stupid bullshit that annoys me. Also, “Chump” indicates someONE, when occasionally, like this week, I’d like to complain about a thing or a concept. I always knew that “Chump of the Week” was just a placeholder while I figured things out, anyway.
“Zigs Picks” will continue, but it is also going to be rebranded this week. Sorry that so much of this Substack is trial and error—this is the most thought and effort I’ve ever put into it, despite running it for over four years now.
Lately, I’ve felt renewed ire towards my most recent breakup. I’m sure many can relate. This just happens sometimes. Maybe that makes it sound like I’m not over it because…. well, I’m not. I’m over him, but I’m not actually over the situation at all, and I can admit that. I started weekly therapy over a year and a half ago, two weeks after I was dumped, and even though my sessions were successful in helping me to move on from the Man as a romantic object, I never quite cracked the solution to letting go of my anger towards him.
Instead, my therapy sessions sort of twisted me into a self-destructive ouroboros of never-ending rage and calm, rage and calm. Cycling through acceptance of what has happened and what I cannot change eventually mutates into anger over the fact that things have been left as they are and a nagging, hate-filled desire to fix that somehow. This dies down a bit once I, like a toddler, have a temper tantrum and tire myself out. But these hangups are never fully extinguished. My therapist1 would consistently get me to a point where I felt okay with how everything had transpired and how I’d handled it, only for lingering neuroses to reemerge like an infection that hasn’t been prescribed quite the right antibiotics.
To be clear: I really don’t think about this breakup too much anymore. But every now and then a domino chain of events may occur wherein, despite the fact that he is blocked on every possible social media platform and we don’t even live in the same state, one thing leads to another and yadda yadda yadda—I’m forced to remember that my ex exists, that he is out there living his life, is perhaps even laughing and smiling. Horrible. I’m then reminded of various things that happened between us and things that didn’t, and maybe things that should have, and I work myself into a little tizzy, the only cure to which is to furiously type away at my iPhone keyboard about how I wish he could be punished “in a biblical way.”2 But then sometimes something even worse happens: I start to think about other breakups, friend breakups. How, as with my last breakup, these people who wronged me never received any consequences, offered no apologies, no catharses; I didn’t even get to scream at them like the emotionally-stunted “Bravolebrities” that I worship. I was treated poorly, and now I just have to move on with my life. Why is that ok?
It is very hard for me to just accept that these things happen sometimes. That people will treat you badly, that they will never take accountability, you will never get to punish them verbally or psychically or through magic, and you have to find a way to make peace with that. I write about movies and watch many of them, and so I KNOW that life isn’t like the end of a movie. I get that most of life is about being unsatisfied with past experiences and learning to live with it. I think it’s just become harder for me in the past few years or so, compounded by multiple relationships in which I was screwed over by someone I trusted, who got away with treating me like shit. By “got away with it” I just mean I didn’t receive an apology and/or I didn’t get a chance to go postal on them. I suppose I could have, but it’s just not in my programming, and it’s led me to wonder if this is why I’ve often been treated like shit by people in my life. Am I just a mark because I don’t behave like Stassi Schroeder or Kristen Doute when it comes to conflict?
In lieu of a public meltdown or verbal lashing, or throwing a drink in his face, my way of dealing with my breakup was to go no contact, forever. We never had the “closure” conversation, because we never saw each other again. He ended things and that was it. To be clear, this was my choice—it was what I needed to get over the relationship and move on. Friendship was not an option. Still, I never blocked his number. I left that door ajar in case my ex finally gained the courage to reach out to me and apologize for how he treated me. I felt that I had been wronged in the relationship, in the breakup, that that was obvious, and so I shouldn’t be the one to come crawling back for emotional exorcism. Perhaps, after a bit of time, he’d gain new perspective on himself, his behavior, and the situation at large.
But he never did, because that’s just how it goes. Against my better judgment, I reached out to him over a year later and directly laid out for him the ways in which he hurt me and why I chose to cut him out of my life. It was a cathartic experience until he replied; his response was paltry and insulting. Still, this made me wonder if I should have tried more. Should I have tried to maintain a connection with him? Should I have tried to have that closure conversation? My way of dealing with multiple friend breakups was to reach out and seek answers and conversation, and these requests were historically dismissed.
And basically, I’m just supposed to be ok with all of this. One of these former “friends” continues to live their stupid little life, and I’m left stewing with resentment over the knowledge of what a callous, cruel bitch they were to me, and towards most other people, too. My ex continues to live his life free of ever saying the words “I’m sorry” to me or even lightly taking accountability for his actions, and so I’m still here stewing over the fact that he just “got away with it,” which amounts to being angry that he’s simply alive. Because of this, I want to do cruel, hurtful things to these people. I want to get unfettered access to them in a secluded, remote location for multiple hours, in which they are restrained to a chair and I am allowed to berate them and scream at them and list all the ways in which they treated me like shit and they have to sit there and take it. I fantasize about running into them someday, and either losing my gourd at them completely or giving them the ice queen treatment. It feels like the only way I can move on from any of this is through verbal abuse and outward malice.
You could argue that in the end, at least in the case of my ex, I’ve moved on, and that that should be enough. I am in a loving, healthy relationship and we even live together. All well and good, yes. I do love Brian very much, I love that we live together, and I am extremely happy with him. It is actually difficult for me to articulate in words just how much I love and adore Brian. Thus, you could argue that my happiness should be the best form of revenge. But also, that just doesn’t feel like the truth to me. I’m unemployed, and I feel like a fucking loser most of the time. I’m happy sometimes, but a lot of the time I’m not. That doesn’t make me feel like I won at anything, or that I have literally anything to sneer at over my opps. Plus, I’m still actively angry, when I’m sure none of these people, even my ex, think about me at all, ever. That only adds to the resentment I feel. They are not just living in my head rent-free, I’m basically paying them to be there.
To be clear: I don’t like feeling this way. I just stupidly believe in karmic justice; that actions should have consequences, that if you sow, you should surely reap. No reaping has occurred, though, and it makes me feel insane. And because I’m always “being the bigger person,” I haven’t actually been proactive at making any of these people reap anything. I’m also just not a Kristen Doute or Stassi Schroeder type. I have never freaked out or fought anyone over anything, but sometimes I wish I had. I try to approach interpersonal conflict in the most level-headed way that I can. I’m not confrontational, but I’m not not confrontational either. I would be lying if I said I didn’t fear heated arguments, but when I feel something’s not right with someone I’m friends with, I do like to face that situation head-on. The only reason I so staunchly avoided my ex was because I was more emotionally dismantled than I’d ever been before and I needed desperately to heal, and that healing couldn’t involve him. Still, when I finally faced my fear and reached out, it wasn’t what I had hoped for. Would an in-person conversation have been any different?
Most people in my life—my friends, my boyfriend, my therapist included, when we were still having our sessions—believe not. In the end, I return to the unfortunate revelation over and over that these situations reflect more on the people who wronged me than they do who they wronged (me), and that I handled them as best as I could have given the circumstances. I believe that all of these people are simply careless, and that careless people are more malevolent and malicious than genuinely evil people. This makes inflicting punishment more nebulous, but I think it’s what makes me more angry. Again, I’m just supposed to be ok with it. I’m just supposed to move on, let it go, and just let them get away with being shitty, careless people. I treat bad breakups like sex perverts evading the law; I unironically view my ex in the same light as Tom Sandoval, even though he did not do anything close to cheating on me with my best friend.
I don’t have any solution to my problem. If I was still in therapy, I would ask to continue to work on this during my sessions, but I also feel like I already did so much talking about it and I didn’t really get anywhere. How do you move on from being treated badly by people you trusted? How do you just accept that bad friends will escape righteous spiritual and cosmic punishment? Not to always bring things back to Vanderpump Rules (but also, everything has to do with Vanderpump Rules), but Ariana Madix sailed through her traumatizing, extremely public breakup by coming out more on top than any scorned woman ever had before. It’s harder to do this when you’re not getting brand deals and Dancing with the Stars and leading roles on Broadway, but I guess this is my PSA that I’m interested in them should the opportunity be open to me. I certainly have the availability in my schedule.
Crucial to note here that I am on a temporary sabbatical from therapy as I do not currently have health insurance.
I don’t even care if his friends read this post and tell him that I’m writing about him. I don’t care if he reads this. I’ve said this on here before but if you date a writer that’s on YOU!!
As someone who DID get to berate my last ex, in a public place and for more than an hour (lol), listing off everything he did wrong and all of the reasons he’s a pathetic loser who I hate… it didn’t actually help. It felt good in the moment, sure, but honestly in the end it felt about the same as if I hadn’t at all. He didn’t apologize in the ways I wanted him to, he didn’t take accountability for anything I didn’t bring up first, and at the end of it all I felt embarrassed for even giving him the satisfaction of seeing me angry. I wish I had just blocked and moved on, but instead our conversation wound up ending on a semi ok note so I kept following him on social media, which just dragged out the heartache even longer. You did the right thing even if it doesn’t feel that way, because getting worked up in their presence just gives them more ammo to think you’re crazy or that you’re overreacting or whatever other unflattering thing they can think of, while blocking ensures that they’ll think of and wonder about you and probably reflect at least a little on what they did. I get it, though — as someone who feels everything so deeply, I’m furious knowing they aren’t doing the same, or have just moved on to some other girl they’ll fuck up too. Thank you for writing and sharing this because it’s deeply relatable and is ultimately gonna be more cathartic than anything you could say to that man’s face.
Brings to mind the MAD MEN "I feel bad for you" / "I don't think about you at all" meme.
Everything I see about Don Draper, he sucks and he's dumb, but he's the hero of his own life and the center of a dark universe. Some (most?) people on the show are/become rightfully disgusted with Don Draper but no one in pop culture is disgusted with Don Draper. Most importantly, Don Draper isn't disgusted with Don Draper in the memeiverse.
Half of the prestige TV shows go right-down-the-middle on this point, that for some people there is very little which makes them disgusted with themselves & consequently little that makes other people disgusted at them as long as they "pull it off". This runs contrary to any notions of shared social justice, which some of us feel very sharply about.
And breakups are a good example. People are pretty cruel about letting a wronged ex suffer alone. They're entirely comfortable orbiting their chosen person, even if they're a jerk. That part is extremely aggravating, sometimes more than the breakup itself. That lack-of-respect hits the worst way at the worst time. Same for friend breakups as romantic breakups.