Why we make villains of the people we can't stop loving

I caught myself doing something strange. Business goes quiet, and inside a day my mind has decided it's Caryn's fault. Caryn was my pivotal friend through my thirties. She has been dead since March 2024. She has nothing to do with whether a client signs this month. But there she is, back in the room, cast as the reason.

The mechanism is simple once you see it. Uncertainty is uncomfortable. My mind doesn't want to sit in I don't know why clients are slow. It wants a cause. So it reaches into the filing cabinet, finds a relationship already loaded with unresolved anger, and builds a story: she never really saw what I was doing, that's why I under-charge, that's why this is happening.

The uncertainty now has a culprit. Anger is easier to organise than not-knowing.

That's the surface. Underneath is something I think is more true.

Blame keeps people alive. If Caryn is still responsible for something happening in my life today, then Caryn is still psychologically in my life today. The nervous system can maintain a bond through grievance as easily as through affection. You can argue with someone internally for years, and there is still an us inside the argument. The relationship hasn't ended. It has just changed genre.

This isn't a Caryn problem. It's a pattern. When someone I loved hurt me and left, or I left them, my mind kept the file open by prosecuting them. Not the small hurts. A colleague who was rude in 2019 doesn't get this treatment. The people who get this treatment are the ones whose loss I couldn't fully metabolise. Which is the clue. Grievance was doing the work grief couldn't finish. As long as I was building the case, I wasn't losing them.

Some of the anger was earned. People hurt me. Some failed me badly, and I'm not writing my way toward a story where everyone was secretly wonderful and I simply cast them wrong. What I'm looking at is what happened after the legitimate hurt. I kept adding fuel because letting the fire go out felt remarkably similar to letting the person go.

I did this with my mother for years, especially as she aged. If only you had. You should have. You caused this. The conversation never had to close because the case was never closed. Blame protected me from the rawer feeling underneath: you mattered enormously, and I can't have the relationship I wanted with you.

Then she was dying. In the week she was in hospital, something shifted. I stopped prosecuting her. I experienced it as spiritual at the time and I still do, but there is a very human architecture under it. The if only you had ran out of runway. There was no future version of her who might behave differently and retroactively resolve the past. No more bargaining with history. When the blame dropped, I could hold the whole relationship at once - what she gave me, what she couldn't, how she hurt me, how much she mattered.

I hadn't forgiven her in the sense of declaring everything she'd done fine. I had stopped requiring the past to be different before I could love her as she actually was.

Caryn didn't get that week. She died alone in Johannesburg and I found out on Facebook two days later. There's no version of that story where I sit next to her and the if only you had runs out on its own. If it's going to run out, I have to be the one to let it.

I don't have to wait until someone is in a hospital bed to stop saying if only you had.

Caryn hurt me. Some of it was real and specific. She also mattered enormously, and I loved her, and I still checked her profile years after we stopped speaking. Both are true. The work isn't to decide she was good or bad. It's to notice, when she appears in my head on a slow business day, that today's uncertainty is recruiting an old bond to carry it. And to ask the sharper question: what happened immediately before Caryn walked into the room? Because that is where the actual pain is.

Allowing someone to have genuinely hurt you without requiring them to become entirely bad leaves you with something much harder to hold.

Grief without a villain.

The pattern I'd been calling needing villains isn't really about villains. It's this: when I cannot bear the finality of losing someone who mattered deeply, grievance becomes a form of continuity.