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This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace, and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message, and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for, from a browse to a bike ride this summer. Find more on Facebook.
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You know, I was on Twitter and Threads last night, and I was like, wow, so many people in the world are hurt right now. Now, we all know the saying hurt people, hurt people. And the algorithm loves hurt people. Why? Because hurt people often go online and say things because they're hurt, which trigger other hurtful people who respond. And it creates debate, creates division, and then it creates engagement, which is dollars, Dallas, for the platforms. And all I realized was, man, people are really baking in their bitterness. I'm sure we've all been there. I've been there. The problem is bitterness is slow, and it's a slow brew, and it can be very dangerous, but it also can serve a purpose. I'm not completely against being bitter, but it does bake low heat, day after day after day after day. And the wild thing is, you don't even notice it anymore. It becomes a part of your aura. That's. That's the sticky part, the smelly part. It becomes you. I'm sure we all have, like, a really bitter family member. Maybe it's an uncle or a grandma or something, or a friend that's just so pessimistic all the time. They just hate everybody and everything or, you know, I'm sure we know those people. It's hard to be around. And the reality is the hurt, the pain just has them in a chokehold. And for many people, being bitter feels like a form of righteousness. For them, while it's happening, it just feels like they're being honest, like they. They have the truth and they're just expressing it. But bitterness isn't always the truth. Bitterness is a story we tell ourselves after the truth already happened. And the longer you tell it, the further you get away from what actually was. You know, I went through something before. I'm not going to get the details, but all I say, all I will say is it was very malicious. You know, somebody had very malicious ill intentions against me. You know, it was very unfortunate. But, you know, I realize in this world, some people really do brew in a. In a very disgusting spirit. And for a Season. It definitely bruised me, you know, and I. I became bitter. And I let the bitterness have its season, too. You know, I sat in and I stirred in it. I. I allowed it to fog my lens, you know, change my perception of the world and certain types of people. And I remember with my therapist, I told her, I'm like, I'm in a season of bitterness. And when I look back, I was like, oh, it's so interesting how I identified it as a season. I didn't say, I am bitter. I said, I am in a season of bitterness. Because I knew I couldn't remain like that forever, but I had to feel it out. And that's the thing with many emotions, right? Like, we're gonna feel them, but emotions are like the weather. They will pass, but we do need to feel it. I always say, there's no hack to grief. There's no workaround. The only way through it is through it. You can numb yourself, ignore it, distract yourself, but at some point, you still have to go through it. So at that time, I felt like I should be allowed to feel the bitterness. And I still. I still believe that it can have a purpose. It can protect you in ways, but it can be very dangerous. Baking and bitterness. Many people in this world right now are baking in bitterness. This is why you go online and you see people who just hate whole people for no reason. You know, hate a whole gender, a race, like, hate a whole whatever, an avatar or something, and they just steepen it and they're in the comments and just perpetually spewing out bs. You know, when someone does something wrong to you or you're just. Maybe you're upset about something that happened. You know, bitterness becomes like a boundary for many. That's your spirit saying, know what happened wasn't okay. It's your mind drawing a line. You know, I will not be treated like this again. I will not be fooled. I will not be tricked. I will not let this happen again. Why? Because you love yourself and you want to protect yourself. So the bitterness seeping in at first is pretty much like a shield. And that's real now. That is protection. Or a season. A season is not your whole life, my friend. A season has a start and an end point. The line between a season and a lifestyle can almost be invisible when you're just fully living in it. The thing is, you don't wake up one day and say, you know what? I think I'm going to make bitterness my whole personality. No, you. You bake in it, and then you surround Yourself with other people who have the same bitterness as you. So it affirms it even more. This is the problem with the Internet. You know, I call them affirmation bubbles, where people, algorithms just mirror their own viewpoint back to them. So it magnifies it as this is the truth. The next thing you know, think everyone thinks like you and reaffirms your perception. It's hurt people feeding more hurt people. And this is a loop by design. Problem is it becomes people's whole personality. And the thing is you just, people stop checking. You stop asking yourself, is this still serving me? You have to be very mindful of how long you stay angry, how long you stay bitter. Now if you're angry with the government, you know, I understand, listen, that's a long road ahead, but we still can't allow it to affect our lives. But you still have to be mindful of how long you stay bitter. You may be bitter with an ex or bitter with a friend, or you know, bitter with a family member. And it is actually slowly, slowly, slowly dulling your spirit. Because at some point the thing that was protecting you starts to become the very thing holding you down. The armor now becomes a prisoner. And you're still there, stuck in shackles, baking in your own bitterness. It's not a good feeling. Maybe you're still running the tape back in your head, still waiting for an apology or justice or something and still making that wound the center of everything. Now we can actually make the wounds the center and do good in the world. You know, somebody who was abused at a very young age may center that pain and become an advocate to help other people who have been abused and protect them. Maybe they become a lawyer, maybe they, you know, develop a non profit and they, you know, create content for awareness, right? This is the beautiful thing as human beings that we can alchemize our pain. Same thing with our bitterness. We can alchemize it. Yeah, this bad thing happened to me. So we can either choose at some point, once we felt it out, to let it go or to alchemize it, you know, and that's on us to decide. You know, the situation that happened to me, you know, I want to alchemize it still into a book. I have a very beautiful concept, very creative concept, and I feel like I have to do it just to, just to release it out in my way to tell my truth. So we must be careful because that, that armor, that bitterness armor is not protection anymore. At some point, you know, just like when you bake a cake what happens if you bake it for too long? You ruin it. And when we're baking in our bitterness, there comes a point where it's heated up long enough. And I had a moment where I realized my bitterness has gone too far. You know, it's like a real moment. I was at my mom's house. You know, me and my mom were talking about some stuff, you know, some modern day cultural stuff that we saw on TikTok. And I said something out loud, something that was out of my bitterness. And my daughter heard me. She was on the couch and just a look in her eyes from what I said, I realized in that moment that my bitterness was now leaking out outside and affecting the ones I love. I don't want my daughter seeing me angry like this or bitter like this, or saying something like this. I can't allow this pain to taint my vision of the world or my vision of certain things. And I don't know, I can't explain really, like, what it does to you. It just really woke me up. And then I remembered when I told my therapist, I'm in a season of bitterness, I was like, okay, I guess now the bitterness is no longer serving me because now it's potentially hurting other people. And I just woke up and I made the decision, the intention, I'm gonna stop being bitter. And I really do think many things start with, with a decision. Now, it doesn't mean when you make a decision, you're gonna be perfect, but everything does start with a decision. Many people back in the day ask me like, hey, how did you stop smoking weed? And I'm like, it was a decision. When I went celibate, it was a decision. You know, I haven't watched porn in 12 years, almost 13 years. People will ask me, like, how did you do that? It was a decision. You know, the power of a decision. Wow. I think we really got to do a whole different podcast on that. I'm going to meditate on that for later this week. But the power of a decision and intention, like you can actually make the intention that this no longer serves me, and I'm ready to let it go. It doesn't mean magically it's going to be off your spirit, but it does mean you will start the process of shedding it. So right there I decided I'm done with the bitterness. It served whatever purpose it was supposed to serve, and now it's just taking up space, making me smaller. And now it's also just teaching my daughter, this is what you do with pain. You hold on to it. You let it define you. You bake it and know. No, no, no. That's not the example I want to make. I'm not doing that. So I made the decision. The thing is, bitterness lies to you. It tells you holding on is the same as being strong. It tells you that if you let go, if you stop being angry, it means that what happened was okay. And that's not true. Neither of those things are true. Letting go doesn't absolve them. It releases you. There is a difference. But there's something else bitterness does, Something more dangerous, doesn't just blind you to one person. Given enough time, it starts to blind you to whole groups of people. You know, one neighbor with a different viewpoint of religion from you. And, you know, you guys get into a little spar, and now you just hate everybody in that religion or that political belief. One man or one woman hurts you. And now it's all women are the problem. All men suck. And now you walk around on TikTok saying, I hate this gender. We see it all the time. I see some of the most disgusting things coming out of people's mouths on TikTok because they are hurt. Let me just say this. If you hate 50% of the population, you are the problem. Doesn't matter who hurt you. If you were robbed by somebody who was Korean, doesn't mean you get the ticket to hate all Korean people. It doesn't work like that. And that's the problem of bitterness, right? Starts to blind you, starts to form a bias, and it starts to project the same pain that was done to oneself. Now it gets painted on to many selves. People are baking too hot in that bitterness. They don't see people anymore. They just see categories. People become blind from ignorance through their bitterness. You know, truth is, bitterness blinds you. It blinds you because you form biases. People who have been hurt so deeply can't even admit when somebody they despise is actually right. You know, you see this all the time. People have brain glitches in their. In their mind. Let's say they hate a politician, and the politician says something that's actually just true. You know, they will twist themselves a notch trying to find a reason to reject it. Maybe a man makes a valid point and the response is, don't make me agree with the man. Like, truth has a gender now. Like, being right. Depends on who's saying it. But even a broken clock is right twice a day. You know that a broken clock is right twice a day. So, you know, even something you hate or you think is wrong most of the time, they can still be right sometimes. And the inability to admit that is a real problem. It means that bitterness has now hijacked your ability to see the ability for common sense and this truth. And this is why we have so many hurt people on the Internet. Her people who are basically like in their own cults of anger and bitterness. That's why you have to be careful how long you bake in that bitterness, because it can be dangerous. Some people are so blinded by their own biases that you can lead them into a contradiction and watch them in real time as their brain breaks. You know, we see this again, we see this a lot, you know, heavy in politics, heavy in gender conversations. You know, we see it in racial conversations. There are some people who are so biased that they will defend the most evil, disgusting behavior just because somebody from, let's say, their tribe committed it. But if the same thing happened on the other end, they would be in an uproar. If anger and bitterness warps your ability to see truth and have true empathy just for humanity, if it erodes common sense, ultimately, you know, it's just making someone dumber, sorry to say. And this is what we see in the world. We see so much bitterness. And we're all going to go through. It's the human experience, right? Like, we all have to go through every single emotion, but we are the ones responsible for those emotions. Now, we may have not been the ones that triggered that emotion, but we are responsible for our own emotions. And again, there's so many people who are hurt by other people, hurt by the system, hurt by their ex, hurt by a family member, whatever it may be, and they take the hurt and they project it. Then they distort reality. And I really do think one of the worst ones right now are the gender divide. Because really what we have is a culture of people who genuinely just want to be in love, but they're just having very poor experiences. And, you know, everyone's consuming horrible dating advice on the Internet, on Tick Tock and, you know, basically forming themselves into gender cults and just hating whole groups of people. You know, I always say our highest form of nutrition is in our expression. I believe in that. I've been saying that for years. And bitterness is a kind of expression, but it's the kind that actually will eventually starve you. You can't feed yourself on what somebody took from you. You can't build a self on just what you're against. You can't grow in soil that's been poisoned by old resentments. And you definitely can't see clearly when your lens is covered in residue of something that happened years ago. You understand at some point we had to make that decision. I am going to let go and move forward. I am going to stop baking in my bitterness. And it's not going to be a celebration for that. No ceremony for that. It's just you choosing to be free, choosing to see people again. Man, I remember in high school, I had such racist experiences happen to me. Ah, man, I had. I had. I had. I had teens call me the N word. I had people, you know, sing racial songs at me. I had, you know, people try to attack me. I could still be very angry till this day, eating a whole type of person, a whole race and gender for that. But I don't. If I remained angry and bitter, I don't think I would have become who I am today. Bitterness stops us from our own growth. Why? Because it stops our heart from pumping. I'm not saying don't be angry, but if we're going to be angry, right, at some point we have to ask ourselves, is this anger serving me? And if you still feel that anger, then how can that anger be a fire? How can you alchemize it into something for good? Not just being hurt and hurting more people or demonizing whole mass groups of people, right? Make an album, make a painting, start a group, start a circle where discussions can be has for other people to release their emotions. You either let go or you alchemize it, or you bake in bitterness and you die slowly. And the bitterness will try to come back. It will knock on the door saying, hey, remember this? Remember how unfair it was? Protect yourself, get angry, get bitter. Then the bias seeps in. And then we fall into blindness. We fall into blindness. I was out like a couple weeks ago, and somebody was saying crazy things to me, like just demonizing a whole type of people while we were at this party, expressing that they are better than them. And I don't know what happened to them, but I was appalled how this person could think like that and even have the confidence to spew that type of BS to me. And when I walked away and I thought about it, I'm like, this is just somebody who is hurt and is so blinded from their hurt they don't even realize how hurtful they are being. And I'm like, it's so unfortunate that they are robbing themselves from the gift of humanity, from seeing good again, from experiencing, you know, love again. From different types of people. I remember my dad told me when he went to Vietnam for the first time, he said people at first were. They told him, they're like, oh, yeah, like, when we first saw you, we were kind of scared. They said in this little village or wherever he was, they didn't have very many experiences of black people, only what they saw on TV and like, negative things. So when they saw my dad, they did not have, like, a positive perception. But my dad's like a chill guy, so he sit down and talk to anybody, you know, My dad's not the type of guy that's going to go on a vacation. I want to chill in the resort, you know, he want to be with the people eating fruit. And he got a good light to him, you know, good positive attitude. And he said. He said, yeah. They told me, like, wow, you've changed our whole perception of black people. Because they just had that one engagement right there, you know, And I'm like, that. That. That is beautiful right there. That is beautiful right there. And I realized, too, it's like when you are bitter, you know, you. You don't. You don't. You don't stop the dysfunction. You continue it. But when you decide to open yourself up, not be naive and stupid, but just to open yourself up and not steep in that bitterness, you become a pattern disruptor. It's like breaking generational dysfunction. What bitterness does to your sense of self, it is. It's crazy how it warps the way you see people, the way you see the world, the way you see your own future. You don't see humanity anymore. And that is a real issue. It makes you blind to truth because you're too busy tracking who said it instead of whether it was actually right. That's when you know it's been in the kitchen way too long. It's time. It's time to turn that oven off and make that decision. We're all going to be hurt. We're all going to be hurt. And you know what? We're all going to hurt somebody, you know, unintentionally. And some people do it intentionally. I realize that in life, every single person on this planet is going to be the superhero and the villain in somebody's story. It's just gonna happen. It's just gonna happen. Doesn't mean you're intentionally the villain. But everybody is going to be a villain in somebody's story, and everyone's going to be the superhero. This is the human experience, baking in bitterness. For some of us, I think we've been simmering a little bit too long. It may be time to begin that process. And again, it starts with a decision. I still have moments of bitterness, because, yeah, things will trigger it, but the love is way greater. It really just starts with the willingness to say, yeah, that's been there for a while. That's kind of taking me away from humanity. It's kind of cooking up a little bit too much hate. And you know what? It's kind of depleting our light. It's time to remove the fog, open up our eyes again, and begin to let love truly flow back into your life. Because all of us, the truth is, we're just trying to live the life that we love and love it while we are living it. Yeah. I don't know. In hindsight, everything gonna be more than all right.