The Tally I Didn't Know I Was Keeping

The Epitaph That Looked Like a Mirror

There is a line on the tomb of a Roman dictator named Sulla. He had it written himself, before he died, the way some people write their own toast.

The line goes something like this:

No friend ever served me, no enemy ever wronged me, that I haven't repaid in full.

He meant it as a flex. A final boast. Two thousand years later it still works as one — for about three seconds. Then you read it twice, and on the second read it stops being about him.

It starts asking a quieter question.

Have you been carving the same thing in your head, just without the marble?

I read it on a Tuesday. I could not put it down for two days.

The thing I noticed first

Here is what surprised me. I do not think of myself as someone who holds grudges. I think of myself as easygoing. Forgetful, even. Ask me what I had for lunch on Monday and I will tell you maybe.

But ask me about the friend who did not show up the week my dog died, and I can tell you the date. The weather. What she said when I asked her where she was. What I wished I had said back.

That is not forgetfulness. That is a receipt. Filed.

I started looking for more of them. They were not hard to find.

There was the boss who took credit for a piece of work I had stayed up all night to finish. The cousin who said something cruel at a wedding I will not name. A teacher from school who told me, in front of the class, that I was not as smart as I thought. A friend who, three years ago, made a joke at my expense and never apologised. None of these people know I am still carrying the moment. Some of them are probably dead. One of them definitely is.

The tally was not a list. The tally was a basement. And it was full.

Why this matters at all

I want to be careful here. Remembering that someone hurt you is not the problem. That is just memory doing its job. The brain logs threats so you do not walk into them again. That is useful.

The problem is something else. The problem is what happens when memory turns into a loop — the kind that plays the same scene on a Tuesday morning while you are making tea, for no reason, three years after the scene ended.

There is a name for that. Researchers call it rumination — the habit of replaying a hurt over and over without it going anywhere. We will get to it.

But before that, I needed to look at the tally itself. What it was made of. Why it formed. Whether it was costing me anything I had not noticed.

Because Sulla's line, on the second read, was not really a boast. It was a confession. He had spent his whole life balancing a ledger nobody else could see.

He died at fifty-eight. Feared, but largely unloved.

I want to know what the tally was actually doing to me before I do that math.

References

• Plutarch. Life of Sulla. The epitaph attributed to Sulla appears in classical sources as a self-composed line summarizing his philosophy of repayment in full.
• Nolen-Hoeksema, S., Wisco, B. E., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). Rethinking rumination. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(5), 400–424. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00088.x

The Recipe for a Grudge

Earlier this year, researchers in Canada published something I keep coming back to.

They wanted to know what a grudge actually is, chemically — not the philosophy of one, but the emotional ingredients that make a hurt turn into a held thing. Across several studies, they figured out the recipe.

There are two ingredients. That is it.

Ingredient one: hurt. The "I trusted you and you cost me something" kind. The wound part.

Ingredient two: anger. Not the explosive kind. The slow kind. The kind that simmers.

By themselves, neither one creates a grudge. Hurt without anger fades into sadness. Anger without hurt fades into a story you tell at dinner. The two together — that is the recipe. And once they combine, something specific happens in your head.

You stop seeing the person as a person who did a bad thing. You start seeing them as a person who is fundamentally bad. Not "she let me down that one time" — "she is the kind of person who lets people down."

Once that switch flips, letting go feels different. It feels like moral failure. Like you are making excuses for someone who is genuinely a bad actor. The grudge becomes righteous. That is the part that locks it in place.

I read this and felt seen and a little embarrassed.

What the tally was costing me

While I was sitting with that, I went looking for the rest. The body's bill on a held grudge. Here is what people have found.

People who hold grudges report more anxiety and depression than people who do not. That comes from work out of a university in Rome. It is not a small effect. It shows up consistently across samples.

Holding grudges raises stress. Stress raises cortisol — a hormone the body releases when it thinks something dangerous is happening. Cortisol over a long time disrupts sleep, weakens the immune system, raises blood pressure, and slowly inflames the body from the inside. The grudge does not know the threat is years old. The body just gets the signal.

Your body cannot tell the difference between a memory and a present danger. It just gets the alarm.

There is one finding that genuinely stopped me. Researchers tracked a large group of older adults for ten years. The people who scored high on hostility and cynicism — the personality flavour grudge-holders tend toward — showed measurably more cognitive decline over the decade than people who reported regularly forgiving themselves and others.

Ten years of holding things makes you forget faster. That is what the data said.

The other thing it costs

There is a smaller study from a few years earlier that I keep thinking about. Researchers found that people who hold more grudges are also more socially isolated — and the direction of cause runs both ways. Holding people at arm's length predicts more grudge-holding later. Holding more grudges predicts more isolation later.

The tally does not just cost you closeness with the people on the list. It costs you closeness in general. Once the basement is full, you start letting fewer people into the house.

That is what I think Sulla missed. He bragged about repaying friends and enemies in equal measure. He died with very few of either left. The line on the tomb makes it sound like a closed circuit. The closed circuit was the problem.

So: the recipe is two ingredients. The bill comes in stress, sleep, blood pressure, and over enough years, memory and closeness.

But knowing the bill does not make it easier to stop. I tried, while writing this, to just decide to drop one of the items in the basement.

It came back the next morning, in line at a coffee shop, completely uninvited.

Which raises the question of what is actually happening when a tally refuses to leave.

References

• Li, J. S., et al. (2026). The emotional recipe of grudge-holding: Hurt, anger, and moral character judgments. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Coverage: psypost.org
• Toussaint, L., et al. (2018). Forgiveness, hostility, and cognitive decline. Discussed at: americanbehavioralclinics.com
• Sapienza University of Rome — study on grudge-holding and depression, discussed in the same source.
• Karremans, J. C., et al. (2016). On grudge-holding and social isolation. Cited at: healthline.com