There are people who make something inside you tighten. Your jaw, your chest, your thoughts, your whole being for an instant!
People who don’t just irritate you, but make you want to correct them, fix them, defeat them, hold a mirror up to their face, make a movie on their behavior and show it to them in an iMax theatre to tell them how it feels.
We like to believe they are the problem. And sometimes they really are!
But what if they are also the mirror, mirror of our inner world?
Carl Jung spoke about the “hero’s path”. It’s the conscious choice to remain good, to resist becoming what one hates. A quiet resistance against internal and external corruption.
Yes, you are the hero (or heroine).
And these people, you may call them enemies, are creatures that make you clench your teeth. You wish to change them, or send them to Mars, with no between!
But they serve a bigger purpose.
We can’t appreciate light without dark, good without bad, and in the same way, we can’t fully know ourselves without the people we despise.
They remind us what we do not want to be.
Joseph Campbell, influenced by Jung, said every hero must confront their “Shadow”. They are the darker, suppressed parts of ourselves. The real victory is not destroying them, but integrating it without being consumed.
Because sometimes, anger rises fast. It asks you to stoop, to match, to return the same energy.
But pause – even for a moment – and you’ll see:
Competing with them makes you more like them, and less like you.
The reason you hate your enemies is because they have hurt you. And when you try to hurt them in the same way, you become the very thing you despise.
This is not a sermon. This is just honesty.
I don’t want to be like my enemy.
I don’t want to carry the same traits as the person I dislike.
I want to remain different.
My enemy tests my moral meter. My belief system. My boundaries.
The people I dislike show me how firm, or fragile, I really am.
The values I despise do something strange: they reassure me when I am drifting.
They force me to check myself.
If you’ve seen Star Wars, George Lucas built its core on this. The constant pull between becoming the evil you fight, or choosing something higher.
We’ll talk about forgiveness and acceptance another time.
For now, sit with this:
Our anger is a psychological mirror.
At the core of the hero’s path is a difficult realization:
We are not just fighting them, we are resisting the part of us that could become them.
It sounds dramatic.
But even small unkind choices slowly build the courage to become someone harsher than we intended.
To become as mean as my enemy.
To be unkind to those who have meant no harm.
To be selfish when others are giving freely, without asking.
To hurt those already broken into a thousand pieces, just to mend my own wounded pride.
To stand and watch while someone’s world burns, because I had no water to save my own.
To turn as cold as Antarctica, because warmth would make me vulnerable.
I am scared to become all of this, just to put my enemy down.
So yes, I want to thank the people who frustrate me.
They have made me think harder. They have forced me to question my beliefs. They have given me ground to stand on.
Even disagreement has shaped my voice.
There are many versions of truth, many value systems. But being challenged has made me look deeper, why I believe what I believe, and where I still need to grow.
It has also shown me how small my thinking once was.
I don’t want a world where everyone is like me. It’s not possible, and maybe not even desirable.
So the only way I can exist meaningfully in this world is by choosing, again and again, not to become what I cannot respect.
Not out of superiority. But out of awareness.
And in the end, as Friedrich Nietzsche warned:
“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster. For when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
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