Reading this post brought this to my mind:
Nietzsche: Freedom from ressentiment, enlightenment over ressentiment –who knows the extent to which I ultimately owe thanks to my protracted sickness for this too! The problem is not exactly simple: one has to have experienced it from a state of strength and a state of weakness. If anything whatever has to be admitted against being sick, being weak, it is that in these conditions the actual curative instinct, that is to say the defensive and offensive instinct in man becomes soft. One does not know how to get free of anything, one does not know how to have done with anything, one does not know how to thrust back – everything hurts. Men and things come importunately close, events strike too deep, the memory is a festering wound. Being sick is itself a kind of ressentiment. – Against this the invalid has only one great means of cure – I call it Russian fatalism, that fatalism without rebellion with which a Russian soldier for whom the campaign has become too much at last lies down in the snow. No longer to take anything at all, to receive anything, to take anything into oneself – no longer to react at all…
The great rationality of this fatalism, which is not always the courage to die but can be life-preservative under conditions highly dangerous to life, is reduction of the metabolism, making it slow down, a kind of will to hibernation. A couple of steps further in this logic and one has the fakir who sleeps for weeks on end in a grave… Because one would use oneself up too quickly if one reacted at all, one no longer reacts: this is the logic. And nothing burns one up quicker than the affects of ressentiment. Vexation, morbid susceptibility, incapacity for revenge, the desire, the thirst for revenge, poison-brewing in any sense – for one who is exhausted this is certainly the most disadvantageous kind of reaction: it causes a rapid expenditure of nervous energy, a morbid accretion of excretions, for example of gall into the stomach.
Ressentiment is the forbidden in itself lot the invalid –his evil: unfortunately also his most natural inclination. – This was grasped by that profound physiologist Buddha. His ‘religion’, which one would do better to call a system of hygiene so as not to mix it up with such pitiable things as Christianity, makes its effect dependent on victory over ressentiment: to free the soul of that – first step to recovery. ‘Not by enmity is enmity ended, by friendship is enmity ended’: this stands at the beginning of Buddha’s teaching – it is not morality that speaks thus, it is physiology that speaks thus. – Ressentiment, born of weakness, to no one more harmful than to the weak man himself – in the opposite case, where a rich nature is the presupposition, a superfluous feeling to stay master of which is almost the proof of richness. He who knows the seriousness with which my philosophy has taken up the struggle against the feelings of vengefulness and vindictiveness even into the theory of ‘free will’ – my struggle against Christianity is only a special instance of it – will understand why it is precisely here that I throw the light on my personal bearing, my sureness of instinct in practice.
In periods of décadence I forbade them to myself as harmful; as soon as life was again sufficiently rich and proud for them I forbade them to myself as beneath me. That ‘Russian fatalism’ of which I spoke came forward in my case in the form of clinging tenaciously for years on end to almost intolerable situations, places, residences, company, once chance had placed me in them – it was better than changing them, than feeling them as capable of being changed – than rebelling against them… In those days I took it deadly amiss if I was disturbed in this fatalism, if I was forcibly awakened from it – and to do this was in fact every time a deadly dangerous thing. – To accept oneself as a fate, not to desire oneself ‘different’ – in such conditions this is great rationality itself.
Perhaps you can relate?