Confessions of a Revenge Porn Addict

By HARV BISHOP

I love revenge porn.

By that I mean fantasies about getting even for slights and wrongs. There are some people I would like to see fail. And fail on an epic scale. I consider myself a spiritual person, but as you might have guessed, I struggle with forgiveness. I hold grudges.

People, circumstances, the election of a president that reflected some values I find abhorrent. It’s not a long s**t list, but it’s a list that raises strong feelings of betrayal and the desire to settle scores. I have no desire to settle scores personally, but I cheer karma on and keep my hands and conscience clean.

Right now I’m fighting the temptation to mock one of the people I need to forgive who reminds me of Rocky the Squirrel of Bullwinkle and Rocky fame. I’ll refrain, but I would still derive great satisfaction from that small measure of score setting. That satisfaction would hold true even though I’m writing about my sincere need to forgive. That’s a measure of how far I have to go.

And at some level I need to forgive life. Truthfully, it’s been a rough year plus for my wife and I on the health front, job front, financial front, and for close friends as well. It’s been akin to being in a Mercury Retrograde that doesn’t end. We’ve dreaded being asked how things are going. It reached the point where neither of us mentioned the latest in what we in New Thought gloss over as “challenges.”

We’ve all known people who thrive on drama, who are energized by crisis, both real and manufactured. I’m not fond of those people coming into my space. As an acquaintance once of said of another friend, “Here he comes with his tale of woe.” Except for friends to seek advice and counsel, we’ve kept quiet.

With a recent late snow storm, I settled in with a couple of books. First, Mitch Horowitz’s latest The Miracle of Definite Chief Aim. I devoured this book in an afternoon. I literally couldn’t put it down and will have much more to say on it later. There, in a substantive section, Mitch offered wise words on forgiveness and how forgiveness is essential to have full energy to pursue what’s most important. I like this in theory I thought, but I have reasons to be angry. Maybe down the road when the dust has settled  I’ll try it.

I dove into another book before bed: Vishen Lakhiani’s The Code of Extraordinary Mind. Lakhiani described being at an intensive meditation retreat wired to sophisticated biofeedback machines to explore what meditations were most effective for creativity, productivity, and problem solving. I was on that chapter in a hot flash. What was most effective? Forgiveness sent the biofeedback machines off the charts in a good direction. My heart fell.

I can be slow on the uptake. Just ask my wife. After our first date I was convinced she blew me off, but in fact she had subtly asked me out again. I was so nervous that I missed the cues. I try to do better now and I recognized the call for forgiveness in that double whammy that snowy weekend.

In spite of the difficulties of the past year-and-a-half, my wife and I have a vision that excites us and we are passionate to pursue. Do we want grudges standing in the way of that vision? No way.

So I’m going to dive into my forgiveness project and I’ll report the results in a future blog.

I’m going to dive in, er, uhh … tomorrow.