Forgiveness

Forgiveness is hard.

Forgiveness is so, so hard.

Forgiveness is hard because it has its own therapied vocabulary that, in the end, does work. But it doesn’t erase the questions around why you had to forgive in the first place. Those are the tabs that stay open in the Firefox of my mind.

Some of forgiving and being forgiven is about learning new words for it. There are three outcomes to a conflict, and they rarely change:

Both people are happy
Both people are miserable
One person gets what they want, and the other person doesn’t

The first two are easy. The last one will keep you up at night. Both people being miserable might seem hard, but you can go to sleep knowing that both parties are in equal pain. Only one person getting what they want is damned unsatisfying.

However, if you’re the person that got what you wanted, there’s really no reason to go over and re-negotiate. Why should you? You got what you wanted! The other person may still have unanswered questions, but it’s ok. Your part is over. Go drink a margarita and celebrate your victory. Good job! You’re done.

If you are the one who didn’t get what you wanted, no margarita for you. Because you have more important things to do. You lost. You’re covered in loss soup with loss croutons on top. You have been beaten, and it hurts.

Time to pick a therapist. Mine is a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia Frozen Yogurt (Today is Free Cone Day), but do what works best for you. Preferably both. Get a therapist to think about your grief, and get the ice cream to forget so that you can put down an impossibly large mind worm.

If you’re on the right track, though, the impossibly large mind worm is going to start with yourself. Taking credit for what you did wrong seems counter-intuitive, but it’s not. By admitting your side of the story, you are releasing yourself from a situation “that happened to you,” into a situation in which you have some control. You may think that someone is withholding information from you, but really, you’ve just missed the signs that have been cropping up all along. In our humanness, we have a tendency to just stop communicating because we have no idea how to say what we need to say. Often, when the truth is what’s necessary, it’s avoided and covered up to save someone’s feelings.

It’s a human trait to try not to hurt people (or, at least, I hope it is). It is also possible for passive aggression to lead to thermonuclear war. The longer you lead people on, the harder it gets to extract yourself. Waiting to tell someone the truth morphs with the lie until you believe it, too. But the other person doesn’t know that. Doesn’t see the way you pull away because they aren’t aware of the possibility… aren’t prepared for the possibility.

If there’s anything we as humans hate, it’s to be caught off guard. It makes people angry because it’s embarrassing. It’s embarrassing to think of how much time you’d been doing something wrong and been denied a chance to make it better. It’s embarrassing thinking about how long this person must have been “putting up with you,” because no human wants to be an obligation. When you call someone on something they’ve been doing for a very long time, they tend to respond like a wounded animal because they didn’t know there was a problem in the first place. It’s injustice. It’s more painful than the explosion that would have happened when you were angry, because it would be over.

Carrying around a grudge against someone is like accepting their resume and never calling them back. They’re hanging on to the hope that they still might get an interview, and you’re concentrating on your anger so much that every day that resume sits on your desk, you’re adding more wood to the fire.

Passive aggression is kindling for emotional destruction. Send a response, even if that response is “I hired someone else.”