I've walked away from a lot of fights feeling proud of myself. I didn't say the thing. I stayed calm. I was the bigger person, my side of the street was clean, and I was supposed to feel finished.
And then I'd get in the shower and the whole conversation would start again. Except this time I'd say everything I didn't say. I'd have the perfect line. I'd run it three or four different ways. Days later I'd still be working on it in my head while doing dishes.
Nobody really tells you that being the bigger person doesn't come with an off switch. You can rise above something and still carry it around for weeks. I've always assumed that meant I was doing it wrong, that a more evolved version of me would have dropped it already.
Keltie Knight thinks the advice is the problem. She's a three-time Emmy-winning TV host, co-creator of the LadyGang podcast, and the author of The F*ck Them Theory: Self-Help for People Who Are Done Being the Bigger Person. She spent 25 years in Hollywood smiling on red carpets while things fell apart behind the scenes, and this conversation was honest in a way I didn't expect.
Is being the bigger person always the right thing to do?
Keltie wrote her book after reading Let Them. She was in a season where everything was being thrown at her and she was trying to digest it all, let it go, stay calm. She figured she just needed to get better at letting go.
Then she sat with it and thought, someone needs to be screaming.
What she said next was one of my favorite lines of the whole conversation. Women of our generation grew up being sold a finish line. Do these ten steps, follow this diet, wear this thing, and you'll reach perfect womanhood and get to stay there forever. Being endlessly zen is just the newest version of that. In her words, “they've given us another crash diet.”
I felt that. Because the expectation isn't only that you stay calm in the moment. It's that you stay calm afterward too, that the feeling disappears once you've chosen the high road. When it doesn't, you decide something's wrong with you.
I recently did an episode on why letting it go is bad advice, and this felt like the other half of that conversation. If we have this drive in us, this need for something to be said or done, why would we be meant to just stuff it down?
Why do I keep replaying arguments in my head?
Because it never got out.
I've written letters I never sent my whole life. If you opened my email drafts from around 2004 to 2017, you'd find a full archive of everything I wanted to say to people and didn't. A few of them got sent by accident, which I don't recommend.
But I've noticed that when I only think about something, it never stops. It keeps growing and shifting, like a story that gets retold until it barely resembles what happened. When I get it out onto something concrete, it finally starts to quiet down.
Keltie uses a practice her doctor taught her called personal emotional writing. You write for twelve minutes without stopping. It doesn't need to be readable. Everything you want to say to the person who hurt you, the mom at pickup who judged you, your husband, yourself. Then you burn it.
She was firm about one detail. Pen to paper. Not a voice note, not typing if you can help it. She believes something about forming the words with your own hand settles your nervous system in a way talking doesn't. She still handwrites cue cards before hosting the Emmys for the same reason, because that's how it goes in.
I'm the woman who'd happily take this to a moon circle and light it on fire. I still liked that she gave it a structure. Twelve minutes. Burn it. Done.
Is spite a good motivator?
I'm dealing with rage in a way I haven't before. Postpartum rage is apparently real. And because I believe there's a design to these things, I've been asking what it's for. Almost every time I feel it, it pushes me to do something.
Keltie's whole career started with spite. She had a bad breakup in her twenties and wanted to ruin the guy's life, so she wrote a book about it. Writing it calmed her down. Along the way, she says, she got hotter, smarter and more ready. Then the book got discovered. She signed with an agency, landed her first TV hosting job and changed careers, all because she wanted to get back at someone.
Her take is that spite starts out small and personal, and then it ends up benefiting you.
My own version goes back a while. In driver's training there was a table of girls in the back who were awful. On the last day I brought cookies for everyone. Theirs had chocolate laxatives in them. They spent the final day in the bathroom.
That girl is still in me. I've just spent a lot of years curbing her. Keltie's mission, she told me, is to unsuppress her. Not to hurt anyone, but to stop pretending she isn't there.
How do you know if you're processing anger or feeding it?
I asked her this directly because it's the part I struggle with. When does letting yourself feel it turn into making it bigger?
She didn't pretend to have a clean answer. She said “yet to be determined,” which I appreciated. But she described a recent email she had to send to someone in her industry. She was angry and wanted them to know they'd messed up. So she wrote version one, sat on it, then wrote a second and a third. By the time she sent it, she'd gotten her feelings out through the drafts, and the final version was much softer than the first.
The person was furious anyway. She felt good regardless.
The difference, for her, is whether you need a reaction. If you're doing it to get something from the other person, an apology or a change or a moment of regret, you're still handing them the outcome. If you're doing it because you needed to say it, the reaction doesn't really matter.
I think that's a useful test. We get so much conflicting advice about this. Follow the fire, but don't be reactive. Speak up, but rise above. No wonder nobody feels sure about where they land. The only truth you really have is your own, and that's the one you can move on.
Why do I feel like a fraud even when things are going well?
In the middle of our conversation, Keltie opened her book and read me a line from her chapter on feeling like a fraud. She wondered if she'd ever stop waking up feeling like she's pretending to be herself.
I got chills. I'd been nodding along and then that last part hit me.
I've been on a lot of long walks this year asking who I actually am. I show up so differently in different groups. I'm a chameleon, and I also have parts of me that never change no matter where I am. How do those both exist? And I sometimes feel like a fraud because some of my initial reactions are still there. I do the work. I shift how I respond. But the first flash of “I will get you for this” hasn't gone anywhere, and part of me thinks it should have by now.
Keltie's story was a perfect picture of this. A few years ago she sold a primetime show to CBS, something almost no woman in her position gets to do. The moment it was announced, she got sued by a man who claimed she'd stolen the idea. International deals fell apart. The show was pushed back a year. And right in the middle of editing it, she flew home to Canada to admit her brother to the psych ward. She took meetings over Zoom from his kitchen table in the morning and sat with him during visiting hours every night, while everyone online told her she was killing it.
What's helped her is giving herself permission to be the whole person. There's Keltie Knight, the sparkly host. And there's Keltie, who likes to knit and watch Drag Race and is messy and makes mistakes. The fraud feeling gets loudest when she believes she's only allowed to be the first one.
She also told me about the last year. She spent most of her life believing her intensity and spite were her superpowers and that calming down would cost her the edge. So she started putting down her phone at dinner and stopped answering emails at 3 a.m. Her line was, “what if the point of life is to be successful without ruining your life in the process?” She says it's a nice way to live.
How to stop being the bigger person without becoming someone you don't like
I asked Keltie what she'd leave you with, and her answer was simple.
Name three things people love about you and three things people say they hate about you. Say them out loud. Then put all six in the same basket and decide you're keeping them.
She's blunt and she can be curt. People find it off-putting. She also says she's the best crisis friend you'll ever have. She might forget your birthday, but if you lose your job or your marriage falls apart, she's there fixing it. She doesn't think she gets one without the other. The same speed that makes her abrasive makes her good in an emergency.
I'd add the writing practice to this. When something is looping, give it twelve minutes on paper and burn it before you decide whether anything actually needs to be said to the person.
And then the piece about enough. Keltie thinks most of us are looking for it from the wrong people. She sorts the people in her life into lifers, best friends, friends and acquaintances, and she's stopped expecting the acquaintance who thinks she's a villain to make her feel whole. She protects her standing with her husband and her two closest friends like it's everything. Everyone else gets to have their opinion.
She actually called being hated an honor. I'm not sure I'm all the way there. But I understand what she means about the freedom of no longer trying to change every mind.
Take this work deeper
If this one stirred something up, the Mind Love Collective is where we practice it with other people. It's a small, honest group that meets monthly, and it's the kind of space where you can say the petty thing out loud and work out what's actually underneath it. It's free to join at mindlove.com/join.
Resources from this episode
- The F*ck Them Theory by Keltie Knight, her new book. Ordering through the site supports local independent bookstores.
- Keltie's book tour, starting in Atlanta on November 15. Dates and cities are at fthembook.com.
- The LadyGang podcast, co-hosted by Keltie.
- Mind Love episode on why letting it go is bad advice: mindlove.com/468
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