That question was asked by a friend who watched me carry an enormous resentment far longer than necessary. It’s never required.

I haven’t told this story to many because it’s embarrassing to think it took me so long to learn something most people learn early in life. This lesson happened when I was eight years sober. Most would say I should have known by then all there is to know about disliking someone to the point where I suffer. I didn’t see it and wasn’t about to ask.

Toward the end of a two-year relationship, the road became very rough. We argued at least once a week and had been engaged seven times by then. We both should have seen the writing on the wall. I was blinded by what I thought was love, but instead, lust or neediness on my part. We both knew it was over, but she didn’t have the money to rent her apartment, which she did have before I rode into town on my white horse to rescue her.

When the final straw was reached, I told her to move within two weeks, or I was putting her stuff in the street. When I returned the next day from work, a police car was in the driveway. My first thought was she may have hurt herself. An officer came out and handed me a piece of paper, a restraining order. I could only retrieve a handful of possessions. I was out of my own home. I moved in with a friend and two weeks later rented an apartment. At the end of the lease, she moved into an apartment of her own for which I paid the security deposit. I still didn’t want to accept the relationship was over.

She started seeing her bartender, a guy named John. He drove a white van. I would attend an AA meeting near her house and see the van parked outside her place. I didn’t look at it as stocking but as keeping the resentment growing. This behavior went on for several months until I had to make a physical change. At the time, the company I had worked for was closing my division and offered me ten months’ severance in a lump sum, which I grabbed up.

Being on my own, knowing I had to break that connection to the resentment, I moved ninety miles away and opened my own business. I had no contact with her for two years, and then she called. She said she had cancer and only three months to live. I journeyed to her apartment, where the white van was parked out front. It still made my heart race seeing it, even after two years.

After a brief how-do-you-do and telling her how sorry I was about her situation, I asked the whereabouts of her friend John.

I about hit the floor when she said, “John died of a heart attack a month after we started dating.”

In shock, I asked, “What about the van out front?”

She replied, “John’s family gave me his van because I didn’t have a car.”

I came to the harsh reality that I had been carrying resentment for the past two years against a dead guy. What a complete waste of time and energy that was.

We all have lessons to learn, but you don’t have to do it the slow way I did. Today, I don’t wait a single day to relieve resentment. I have realized the hard way that “I am the one who suffers,” and I don’t like suffering. Pain, yes, I can deal with that, but suffering is a luxury best left to those more capable of handling it.

Today, after thirty years sober, I can laugh at this experience. Thank God I learned that lesson and reminded myself that “Carrying resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other guy to die.” Who’s the one who suffers?