I want to say somewhere: I've tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in.

The speaker frames anger not as a sudden eruption but as a long, chosen habitation—something “courted,” then welcomed like a guest. The passage dramatizes the moral tension between the desire to be “forgiving” and the seductive clarity that bitterness can provide: it offers “satisfaction,” a sense of power or coherence when life feels ugly or unjust. By admitting complicity (“I invited it in”), the voice shifts from self-justification to self-indictment, suggesting that resentment can become an identity over “whole years.” The quote’s force lies in its candor about how negative emotions can feel purposeful, even intimate, before they hollow a person out.