The End of Bitterness

One of the more extraordinary things that has come out of the healing work I’ve been doing on myself has been the end of my ability to be bitter about anything. Not beginnings, not endings, not the things which happen in either, nor the things which happen between them.

The secret, funny enough, is the death of expectation.

In retrospect, I’ve spent most of my life traveling between hope, expectation and disappointment. All can be a kind of enjoyment, especially if you expect disappointment. It can be satisfying to be right, even when you’re right about things going to shit. Most of my life, I’ve copiously poured attention and energy into expectation, into ideas, ideals, and imaginary scenarios to soothe my fear about the future and my anxiety about what could happen.

Now that I have done a sufficient job of killing the desire to expect things—that treadmill of the imagination where what should happen just doesn’t—I find even when I consider things which would, years ago, have filled me with the familiar metallic taste of bitterness, now I simply have acceptance. It is whatever it currently is, right now. My reaction is whatever it is, right now.

I have what I have right now. I am what I am right now. The past and the future are imaginary.

It is an incredibly free state. I do not need right now to be anything, I am not holding out hope for things to be other than what they are, and I have no time for questions of what things should be.

I am. No more, no less.