As young adults, and really as human beings, conflict with others is just something we cannot avoid. Friends, family members, authority figures––if you’ve known someone for a good amount of time, you are going to run into some sort of conflict. I know that college students, like myself, tend to hold grudges and just cut people out of our lives. We throw around the word hate too easily, just as easily as we throw away all the memories and good times we had with that person who hurt us. Forgiveness is something we all learn about, but something we never really learn the importance of.
I can tell you firsthand that I am guilty of everything I talked about in my first paragraph. However, throughout my childhood, my view on forgiveness was simple: forgive and forget. I feel like the innocence we have as children teaches us to just apologize and move on. I loved that, because I always and still do hate conflict and confrontation. I’m someone who would rather just avoid the confrontation and just forget that everything happened. Middle school was the first time I experienced having to really forgive someone after a severe bullying incident that, at the time, destroyed my self-esteem and happiness. I was so upset and scared by everything that happened that in my mind, I just wanted it to go away. As I mentioned before, I just liked to move on and avoid conflict, but in this situation, there was nothing I could do. I wasn’t the one who needed to do the apologizing. I was the one who needed to do the forgiving, which is harder then it seems. Long story short, a few years later I did receive an apology, and I did forgive her, a little too easily, I think, now that I’ve learned so much.
Forgiving is not an easy thing to do, but, trust me, the results of actually forgiving someone are better for you. You cannot hold on to negative situations. You cannot live happily with hate in your heart. You need to let it go. If someone hurt you, you can’t go back into the past to fix the situation. You need to make peace with it, forgive, and not forget. I know every situation is different, and some are more severe than others, but when I am reminded by people to not forgive, I tell them (as a good, devoted Catholic school girl should), Jesus forgave those that killed him, so we can forgive one another. Don’t mistake this for forgiving and forgetting. You should never forget what someone did to you, especially if they scarred you emotionally. For your sake, for you to move on, forgive them. Say hello to them when they walk by. You don’t need to be best friends again but you don’t need to be rude. Please, life is too short to hate people or cut people off because of one thing they did to you. You will be so much happier when you don’t have to worry about avoiding that one person or cutting them off.
Holding a grudge doesn’t make you a strong person. It shows bitterness and weakness. Forgiveness shows strength of character and shows that you care about not only your own peace of mind, but the other person's as well. Forgive. Don’t live with hate. Live with love.
