Get Through Your Darkest Times By Harnessing The Power Of Spite

It’s a deeply underused superpower

I’m gonna start this article about spite on a very happy, positive note. That will change.

Buckle up.

Looking Backwards to Help You Harness Your Inner Strength

Today I read a lovely article by Liberty Forrest, Author called “How To Access Your Inner Strength and Overcome Everything.” In it, she talks about (wait for it) finding and using your inner strength. (I have shocked you. I know.)

One tool that she mentions she has used in the past to access her inner strength is that when looking forward is just dark and awful and hopeless (her excellent phrase: “the only light at the end of the tunnel is the train coming at you”), she instead looks backwards.

She looks back at what she has overcome, and reminds herself that she didn’t believe she could get through it, but she did, “and a whole lot more.”

My Secret Inner Strength Superpower

Because this is how my brain works, this again lovely and hopeful article reminded me of a tool that I have used in my life to get through some deeply unfortunate stuff. And that is:

Sheer spite.

Spite, properly used, can be an invaluable weapon again literally anything life has to throw to at you. And I’m going to riff on Liberty’s advice and combine it with mine to come up with the following:

If you are going to through objectively terrible shit, look back. Look at everything you’ve overcome, everything you’ve gone through in your life.

Then look at what is facing you now, and get mad.

“I BEG your fucking pardon, I did not go through all the bullshit to be taken down by THIS.”

How to Harness The Power of Spite

To properly harness the inner strength of sheer spite, you must get deeply, personally mad at whatever is facing you. Not at a person! The situation itself.

It is trying to take you down after you have gone through so much. You did not. Go through fire (of whatever variety). TO BE TAKEN DOWN BY THIS BULLSHIT.

What you’re facing might be absolutely terrible. It could be life-threatening. But if you are not actively dead, and hope and strength have fled you, there is another way.

Get mad. Decide to get even by surviving. If that’s the only thing that can get you out of bed in the morning, do it out of sheer, unmitigated spite against anything would dare to try to take you down.

You can get to the happy feelings later, once you’ve stayed alive and/or functional. This isn’t necessarily the path of first recourse, because it takes some doing to live out of sheer spite and not let that bleed over into other areas.

But if you’re against the wall?

This bitch is not gonna win.