Resentment Is What Happens When You Don’t Say No :012 Big Sister Tuesday
Big Sister Tuesdays Letter — For anyone who has ever said yes when they meant no and wondered why they feel so tired.
I didn’t realize I was resentful.
I just thought I was tired all the time.
Resentment is something nobody really talks about in polite company. We talk about gratitude. We talk about grace. We talk about being the bigger person. But resentment? That quiet, heavy, building feeling that shows up when you have given too much for too long without anyone noticing, including yourself? That one we tend to keep to ourselves.
I am done keeping it to myself.
The older I get, the easier it becomes to feel resentful. The more I live, the more expectations I carry of others, of situations, of how things should go if everyone would just do what they are supposed to do. And when they do not, when people fall short or circumstances take longer than expected or life refuses to cooperate, it is hard. Really hard.
So I went looking for answers.
Resentment builds from unvoiced frustrations, unmet needs, and boundaries we didn’t even know we had.
Unvoiced frustrations. Unmet needs. Boundary violations.
I read that three times.
Because here is the thing. A lot of my resentment has not come from other people doing terrible things to me. It has come from me not knowing my own boundaries until they were already crossed. From saying yes when I meant no. From being a recovering people pleaser in spaces where I did not even know the rules yet.
And I have had to learn, slowly and sometimes painfully, what to do about it.
So here are four things I know now that I wish I had known sooner.
1. Resentment Is a Signal, Not a Sentence
When resentment shows up, it is not there to punish you. It is there to tell you something.
It is your body and your spirit saying, something here does not feel right. A line was crossed. A need went unmet. Something you gave was not yours to give in the first place.
Resentment is what grows when your truth stays quiet.
The mistake I used to make was sitting in the resentment and calling it a personality trait. I am just “hard to please”. I expect too much. That is not true.
Resentment is information. The question is what you do with it once you hear it.
Stop punishing yourself for feeling it. Start asking what it is trying to tell you.
2. People Pleasing Is Not Kindness. It Is Self Abandonment.
I learned to be a people pleaser early. Oldest child. Only girl. Immigrant parents. African household. From a very young age the message was clear, your needs come second. Actually, your needs come last. You bend to everyone else first and figure yourself out later.
And I was good at it. So good that I did not even notice I was doing it.
It was not until I was 25, yes I know, that I packed up my room in Troy with nothing but my best friend and his brother helping me move to downtown Detroit just to find out who I actually was without everyone else’s needs layered on top of mine.
That move changed me. But people pleasing does not disappear just because you decide you are done with it.
It comes back. Especially when you are somewhere new.
It is easy to let the people closest to you dictate areas of your life that should have had boundaries. Agreeing before you ask yourself, is this actually something I want to do? Is this something I even have the capacity for? Did I already have plans?
You don’t need better people. You need clearer boundaries.
When your default, out of fear of getting it wrong, is to make everyone else comfortable at the expense of yourself.
That is not kindness. That is self abandonment.
And self abandonment always leads to resentment.
3. You Cannot Violate a Boundary You Have Not Named
This one took me the longest to learn.
For a long time I was getting hurt by things I had not even identified as boundaries yet. I would feel that slow burn of resentment and not be able to explain where it came from.
And then I realized, I had never actually sat down and decided what was okay with me and what was not. I had just been reacting.
You cannot be upset about access you never restricted.
You cannot protect something you have not named. You cannot communicate something you have not first admitted to yourself.
So the real work, is not telling other people your boundaries. It is figuring out what they actually are first.
Name your boundaries before someone else crosses them. It is much easier to hold a line you know is there.
4. Letting Go of Resentment Is Not About the Other Person
This one is hard to hear but I am going to say it anyway.
Holding onto resentment does not hurt the person who crossed the line. It hurts you. It sits with you. It makes you heavy. It makes you contract when you should be expanding.
Letting it go is not about excusing what happened. It is about refusing to let it take up space in your present.
I am still working on this one more each day. Resentment, once identified, calls us to let it go. Which is a polite way of saying forgive them. Yeah, that very unattractive word that takes a lot more than we signed up for. At first I thought forgiveness meant just saying it and moving on. But I found out that each time I would see the people I had grown to resent, I still could not look at them without feeling the weight of it.
Sometimes forgiveness looks like saying I forgive them every day. Every time their name is brought up and you still feel uncomfortable. Every time you see them and the feeling is still there.
Why, you might ask? Because you do not need to keep carrying what you never chose. You just need to stop saying yes to it.
Which of these four hit closest to home for you right now? Tell me in the comments below.
Until Friday,
From your most zealous americanish girl 🌍💌
I think 4th one is the hardest for me.