I Needed a Villain

Resentment was the only job I never got laid off from.

What are you going to do about it?

I used to not ask myself that.

I was waiting for poetic justice to pour out of the sky. I thought if enough truth stacked up on my side, reality would eventually be forced to admit I’d been getting fucked over.

So I drove home from work angry.

Full-burn angry. Rage that tastes like copper. An hour each way, two hours a day, and I used all of it to replay the same facts until I had a version of the story that didn’t make me want to put my head through the windshield. Imaginary conversations. Speeches nobody asked for. By the time I pulled in I’d won every argument I’d had with myself, and I still felt like shit.

The promotion that never came. Promise made at an inconvenient time to keep me useful, keep me hopeful, keep me working. I was a number on a spreadsheet, and eventually the math next to my name wasn’t good enough.

So I got laid off in the third round of company-wide layoffs.

They went down the spreadsheet.

It was my turn.

I didn’t just resent the person who made a promise he had no business making. I resented the whole company. Every smiling idiot still employed there. The whole pretense that any of it was personal when it never was.

They did me wrong. Simple as that.

For the most part, they were doing business. That did not make me less angry. Your life gets bent out of shape and somebody else closes a laptop and goes to cosplay as a musician for a crowd of five.

Anyway.

It happened again at the next job. And the one after that. Different promises, same pattern. Acquisitions, dissolving futures, legacy accounts with legacy pricing and someone else’s reasons for not renewing, parked next to my name. Three times I watched the same movie.

Every time, I acted like I had no options.

I had options. I made excuses. I pretended I didn’t.

Tired of getting fucked. The details changed. The pattern didn’t.

Just me and the bottle. They walked away from it. I kept carrying the anger like it proved something.

What I thought resentment was doing for me: keeping me sharp. Making sure I wasn’t a doormat. Proof I was smart enough to know when I was being played and principled enough to stay pissed about it.

What it was actually doing: keeping the spotlight off me.

Sadness was too naked. I wasn’t ready to sit in it. Anger was easier. You could drive on it, lift on it, rant on it, and still feel like you were doing something. Sadness just told you the truth and sat there.

Some of that anger was real. That didn’t make me right about everything else.

I was afraid the ledger went the other way. That I wasn’t good enough and couldn’t afford to find out. So everybody else had to stay guilty. Because if I really blamed myself, I would’ve had to look at the alcohol. And then at why I needed it so badly.

That was not an option. Not until it was the only option left.

So I used blame to fuel the workouts, the rants at the bar, the conversations I kept having with people who weren’t in the room. It kept the movie running in my head where everyone finally understood what they’d done.

Anything but looking at the rot beneath the deck.

I did not want to deal with myself. I needed a villain.

There came a point where I ran out of road.

To be clear — I’d run out of road long before that. I was off-roading toward a cliff with a full explanation and no brakes.

It was fluorescent light and paperwork. A room that didn’t want the backstory. A document with my name on it and no column for context.

The speech died in my mouth.

The bottle’s name wasn’t on the paperwork. Just mine.

And eventually the evidence points to you. Only to you.

And when you try to point to the bottle, the empty bottle just sits there.

You drank me, didn’t you?

Why?

I spent years making sure I never had to answer that.

Because once I did, the whole case against everybody else started falling apart.

And underneath all of it was me.

What are you going to do about it?

Make a speech.
Build a villain.
Pour a drink.
Call it fate.

Anything but take responsibility. Anything but admit that after all the injustice, all the excuses, all the real legitimate wrongs I could stack in my favor—

I was still the one at the helm.

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