It's Okay… to Hold a Grudge

If it's good enough for Taylor…

Photo by Tolga Ulkan on Unsplash

It’s been pretty hard to miss the news that Taylor Swift has been designated Time’s 2023 Person of the Year (and, arguably, harder to ignore the discourse that this is an egregiously cowardly and apolitical stance, in a year where we’ve seen the courage, strength and tenacity of the Palestinian journalists who are reporting from the front lines of their own genocide by Israeli forces, in a conflict that has seen the highest number of journalist casualties of any conflict since records began… but I digress).

Multiple articles have been written about the news, some of which even include warnings from Elon Musk, the 2021 title holder (what a difference two years makes…), and her interview with Time has been disseminated and quoted as far as the eye can see.

One of the moments most often referred to is her “beef” with Kanye West, and subsequent back-and-forth with Kim Kardashian, who does, it must be said, know first hand, the power of video.

Now, seven years later, Swift is talking about the effect Kardashian’s social media postings – in defence of her then-husband, West – going as far as to say that it felt, to her, like the death of her career. (This assertion has also been given a lot of tabloid inches; the first single Swift released after the Kardashian “drama”, a duet with Zayn for the Fifty Shades Darker soundtrack, I Don’t Wanna Live Forever, went straight to #1.)

Still, Swift is frank about the emotional impact of these events.

“That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.”

Regardless of how impactful you feel Kardashian’s Snapchat showdown really was – seven years later, Swift is smashing records with the Eras tour, the first ever concert tour to gross more than $1 billion – the true takeaway from all of this Time chatter is that, despite her talent, money and ability to nab, honestly, every and any man she sets her sights on, Taylor Swift is just like the rest of us: petty, bitter, and holding on tightly to her grudges.

What makes it all so much sweeter is that, without a doubt, grudge-holding is not the done thing. A quick Google search – this advanced methodology is, perhaps, why I never did a PhD – for “holding a grudge” shows a pretty definitive verdict.

“When we hold onto grudges and resentment, it’s like drinking poison and expecting the other person to get sick,” says Angela Buttimer, MS, NCC, RYT, LPC, a licensed psychotherapist at Thomas F. Chapman Family Cancer Wellness at Piedmont. “It causes us to carry negative, tense energy in our biology.”

I may not be a doctor of any kind, but even I know that the notion of “carrying” energy, negative or otherwise, in our “biology” is some kind of massive quackery that doesn’t bear too much delving into. (For more on quackery of all kinds, by the way, I highly recommend the podcast If Books Could Kill, which deep dives into an array of the kinds of self-help and “succeed in business” titles you’re likely to see in an airport bookshop’s bestsellers display.)

And while the broad consensus is that the holding of grudges is, overall, not good for us, there’s no denying that we all do it.

Thankfully, there are some dissenting voices – like Sophie Hannah (of course, a Brit, probably tied with the Irish as the world’s champion grudge-holders), whose book, How to Hold a Grudge, is a self-help book that extols “the power of grudges to transform your life”. There’s even an accompanying podcast.

If you think about it, the centuries-old wisdom that tells us how very important it is to forgive and forget is a kind of insidious form of gaslighting, inducing us to just… move on and ignore the fact that we have been willfully hurt by someone who simply may not deserve our forgiveness (or to have their bad behaviour forgotten).

It can also often pile guilt and shame on top of a sincere sense of hurt or a deep wound that we are not permitting ourselves to give the appropriate respect and consideration to. How can we heal if we’re too busy telling ourselves that we should be over it, that we should, instead of processing our own trauma, be focusing on forgiving and forgetting?

But don’t forget: while holding a grudge might feel like the right thing for you, your feelings and your ability to process those feelings, it’s also possible that it could be standing in the way of your moving forward, and that’s no bueno.

For me, a lot of my grudge-holding has been emboldened by the knowledge that the perpetrator in question isn’t even sorry, but it turns out I’ve been barking up the wrong tree because, according to the experts, “forgiveness exists separately to reconciliation.” I’ll admit I have my doubts, but I’m willing to look into it a bit more.

For now, though, I’m just happy in the knowledge that billionaire superstar Taylor Swift and I have more in common than cat ownership and fancying every man we’ve ever set our eyes on – and hers is company I’m quite happy to be in, thank you very much.

I might – might – consider dropping those grudges next year. Stranger things have happened…