Most people won’t admit this out loud, but almost everyone has felt it.
Someone lies to you. Uses you. Takes something that mattered. Ghosts you. And at some point, a thought slips in: “I hope this blows back on them.” Maybe you don’t want to ruin their life, but you want them to feel it. To lose something. To get hit where it hurts. To feel ignored when they need someone.
That reaction is human. It comes from shock and anger, not from being a bad person.
The problem starts when you stay there.
When You Sit in That Anger, You’re the One Paying for It
Holding onto spite feels active, like you’re doing something. But in real life, it just sits inside you and rots things from the inside out.
You replay the story.
You tense up when their name comes up.
Your body stays on edge.
Nothing is happening to them in that moment. Everything is happening to you.
I used to think wishing harm was a form of balance, like emotional bookkeeping. Someone hurts you, they should lose something too. Fair enough. Except that while you’re busy hoping for payback, your own life starts getting smaller.
Less energy.
Less patience.
Less joy.
Not because you’re weak. Because anger takes up space.
A Big Mirror
There’s a saying people repeat a lot: show me the people around you, and I’ll tell you who you are. It often gets misunderstood, and honestly, it’s been used to shame people who didn’t deserve it.
Being hurt by someone does not say you are capable of doing the same harm. Getting betrayed does not make you untrustworthy. Being treated badly does not mean you secretly deserve it. What this idea actually points to is something else entirely.
Your life works like a mirror. A mirror doesn’t judge. It doesn’t decide what’s right or wrong. It simply shows back what’s being put in front of it. When anger, resentment, and spite stay active inside you, they don’t float away toward the other person. They stay in your system. They shape how you think, how your body feels, how you react to unrelated situations.
So when you keep wishing harm on someone, that wish doesn’t travel outward and disappear. It loops back into your own days. You replay conversations. You tense up at reminders. You carry irritation into places where it doesn’t belong. Even when the other person is gone, they’re still taking up space.
This is where people get stuck. They think letting go is about being fair or forgiving or morally better. It isn’t. It’s about ending a cycle that keeps hitting you over and over.
Anger has a purpose at first. It protects. It shows you where a line was crossed. But when it turns into something you revisit daily, it stops being useful and starts draining you.
The mirror doesn’t care who started it.
The mirror just keeps showing you what you’re holding.
Wishing bad on someone ties you to them longer than any conversation ever could. It keeps the wound open. It keeps your nervous system on alert. It keeps you living in a moment that already passed.
Stepping away doesn’t excuse what happened. It doesn’t rewrite the story. It just stops the echo.
At some point, choosing yourself looks very unromantic. It looks like boredom instead of obsession. Calm instead of revenge. Space where anger used to sit. That’s when the mirror finally changes what it shows.
What Actually Helps
You don’t need to pretend you’re fine. You don’t need to send anyone love if that feels fake. What actually helps is stopping the daily habit of feeding the anger.
Feel it.
Acknowledge it.
Then stop giving it more airtime.
Distance is self-protection. And most of the time, the person who steps back, creates space, and lets go ends up better off than the one who stays stuck replaying the damage.
And if you’re curious or you feel like someone won’t leave your head no matter what you do, you can look into this forget-someone spell as an experiment. Not as an escape, just as a way to shift the focus back to yourself.
