Guest Grudge: A debt is its own prison

In our second guest essay, we hear how $20 became a wedge in a friendship.

Note from Danny: This is the second guest essay I’ve published here at Grudgery.

It shows how the depth of grudge is often unrelated to the actual transgression. In this case, it’s $20. But it’s not just $20. It’s the fact that $20 was not repaid despite multiple requests. That $20 has come to stand for something else in the author’s mind.

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A debt is its own prison

Nom de grudge: He Who Must Not Be Named but May Be Forever Owed

The loan was small enough to be embarrassing. Many wouldn’t even count it as a loan.

All I did was cover a friend when they were short $20 one night, the way you do for someone you like, figuring it would come back the next time around.

Only it didn’t.

And it hasn’t come back anytime since.

I did ask for it back. In fact, I asked for it back twice, which for me is practically the equivalent of sending a legal letter of demand.

The first time I asked for the money back, I kept the conversation light and laughed it off, but the second time I meant it. I even brought up how they should spot me dinner that night instead, and they laughed it off again.

After that, I gave up. Too easily, if you ask my mom (shout out to my mother), but from my perspective, going after the money had turned into the Sisyphus deal, with the rock rolling back down the hill every time. Except this rock had a phone and could have paid me whenever it felt like it.

Before you go thinking I’m the scummiest of human beings for my $20 grudge, I gave said friend ample time to pay me back because I’m not about kicking a person when they are down and out. I understand that we all have financial woes and that life throws curveballs even the most astute of us can’t see at times.

So I let their debt sit. And sit.

I told myself I was being understanding, and I know I was, but in the back of my mind, every time I saw them, I remembered they owed me that $20 and never forgot it.

Does that make me a bad person? Evil?

You’ll have to be the judge because I never once told my friends about it nor have I brought up the money owed at the dinner table. I kept the entire debacle to myself, which is its own private punishment.

Every couple of months, I still go through the effort of typing out a calm and fair text message about the $20, but I’m too ashamed to hit send.

So I delete it the second I realize what I’m doing, because I do sound a tad insane.

I backtrack because I realize that asking for the money back is the equivalent of blowing up a decades-long friendship over some sum that’s barely enough to get you dinner at any fast-food restaurant. I’m not quite ready to let go yet.

But I’m right.

I know I’m right in a way that would survive any court and any neutral party you cared to put in the room, but there’s a gravity that comes with having the moral high ground.

I get to be the better person and the wronged person at once, which is a lot of real estate for the small sum of $20.

So I say all this to say that this stopped being about the money a long time ago and became about the principle of things.

My friend treated me with a lack of respect, and that’s a tarnish to their name forevermore in my books.

As you’re reading this, perhaps you’re thinking of a similar situation where someone did something small to you that you’ve never been able to get over. You may have even told everyone you let it go. You are lying, the same way I am lying. You know it, and so do I.

Note from Danny: The pattern the author describes is one I am VERY familiar with.

Stewing on what I felt I was owed. Imagining a confrontation in which I insisted on accountability.

My grudges have been as small as something someone posted about my wife on Twitter all the way up to a stepfather who cheated on my mom, contracted a disease while doing so and then spent through the retirement savings that was supposed to be shared.

The size of the transgression isn’t what gives a grudge its horsepower. It’s that feeling of being wronged, which I think the author describes quite poignantly. It’s quite intoxicating.

In my experience, it’s only when you’re willing to let go of that moral high ground, to accept what has happened and stop expecting a further resolution, that I’ve been able to truly let go of a grudge.

Got a grudge you're willing to share?

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