I don't know about you, but lately everywhere I turn all I see is hatred. Online, in my classes, and even articles I read in the newspaper. No one can seem to get along. As the world grows older, anger becomes more widely accepted. Just like everyone else, I found myself looking at tweets that were clearly meant to belittle another person and laughed at how the person on the other end was being called out. But then I took a hard look in the mirror and realized how unbelievably petty I was being.

The thing about life is that people are going to hurt you. No matter how kind you are, how much you try to stay out of it or isolate yourself, you will get hurt emotionally at some point. Often times the person that hurts you gets away with what they did completely unscathed while you have to pick up the pieces of your former self. That person probably broke your heart without a second thought. And they may go on to live a great life with no repercussions, so how does that make you feel?

If you're anything like the average human being, you'll feel upset that you were the one scorned. You might even want to make that person feel the way you do at that moment.

The thing is, you could actually choose to just forgive them.

Before you go thinking that some things are too terrible to forgive, let me remind you what forgiveness means. Often times people associate forgiveness with forgetting all past errors and moving forward with a toxic person in their life. I am here to tell you that this is completely false.

Here's the actual dictionary definition of forgiveness:

"To cease resentment against someone who has done something wrong."

As the actual definition proves, you don't need to get an apology to forgive. You don't have to keep being good friends with whoever hurt you, and you definitely don't even need to be friends with them on social media. So often people claim they want to erase the hurt and memories someone left behind. They try anything and everything to achieve this except actually forgiving them.

My best friend is a psychology major, and she has always been the first person to tell me to forgive those who have hurt me. She was the first to remind me that every person thinks differently. The people that hurt you most likely can't even fully grasp what they have done because their brain doesn't work the way yours does.

So instead of going over it again and trying to convince them to see it through your eyes, it is better to just accept that they can't understand. Forgive them, and remove the pain from your life completely because it’s not worth your sanity.

This year alone I have had many people do wrong against me, and there were countless times I wanted to talk badly about them as people. I felt like if I put them down and had friends agree with me, then somehow I would be brought up. That didn't happen because I was just talking about my strife more, and this led me farther away from true contentment with the situations.

So I have now forgiven every one of these people, truly. I hold no resentment, only love. It was no easy task and it took a while, but I stayed determined. I can truly say that I'm much better off because of it.

For this, I have been met with various comments including, "Wow if I were you I would never forgive them." But you never realize how easy it is to let go of the resentment until you just forgive them.

They say the best revenge is living well.

Instead of this, I would challenge you to simply live well for yourself, not to get revenge. You will be much happier, and all those memories of your former hurt will disappear.

So while pettiness ushers in and floods our culture, be the one person who decides to choose love instead.