See, I’m way to kind to mess with someone’s sanity.
I was best friends with another misfit ugly duckling girl like myself through most of grade school and all of high school. She grew up and changed into a beauty, and all the guys, including guys that I liked, were drawn to her. I put up with it for a few years, but when we were young adults and I discovered that she was seeing my first boyfriend behind my back (even though she had her own boyfriend at the time), I had had enough and cut her out of my life. That was when we were 24.
When I was about 40, and the internet was beginning to take hold, I became aware that she was trying to track me down through my sister, but I refused to respond. I was still angry.
In 2010 or so I joined Facebook, and in looking at some sort of alumni data page for our high school, I saw that she had died in 2007 of pancreatic cancer. I friended a grade school chum who had known her too, and he confirmed it and told me that he had she had chatted on occasion through the years, and gave me her married name.
Through familysearch.org, I was able to work out that she was married and divorced about five times through the years. I don’t think she handled her beauty all that well.
All in all, I wished I had gotten over my grudge and recommenced communication with her back when I was forty.
Yep, there comes a point when you just have to say enough is enough and move on. I don’t think it’s holding a grudge, it’s called maintaining your sanity and their safety.
I had a best friend for more than ten years who suddenly disappeared from my life, and I never did figure out why. I didn’t see any payoff in asking her about it, but even now I sometimes wonder. I don’t really want the kind of friend who would behave that way so I just let it (and her) go.
My mother told me she has never forgiven her brother for allowing his in laws to exclude his family at his wedding, she said they had a large table for the bride and groom and all HER family members and side tables for all his family members. When brought to his attention he just said he was letting her do whatever she wanted.
ETV78 here! My clarification (warning-longish)- I was adopted as an infant, my family was told that the state would provide for my most costly needs. They backed out, and as a young adult I had the opportunity to move into a subsidized apt. My parents convinced me it was a bad idea, and due to my naivette, I believed them. The truth was: my father wasn’t done getting his $$$ back, and my mother, a housewife, needed a place to live. I also took on too much in my life during college, just to please my Dad. My life went off the rails, and only recently became anything remotely resembling happy.
So your dad ruined your life by persuading you that you shouldn’t take an action that would leave your mother homeless?
My sister and I both had really crappy childhoods. I spent about 40 years of my life unable to let go of my anger. Then I let it go. My sister is still hanging on to hers. It poisons everything she does with our family, because everything that happens or doesn’t happen right now, she interprets with the mind of that child who is long gone. No one trusts her, and she doesn’t understand why they don’t. She is viewed by one and all as a loose cannon who lashes out bizarrely for unpredictable internal reasons. She is waiting for everyone else to change so that she can be at peace. Always a recipe for misery.
I’m no miracle of cheerfulness, but I wasn’t all that different from her once. How did I let it go? Well, I had to first figure out why I couldn’t forgive/let go despite years of therapy blah blah blah. The heart of it was, if I dropped my grudge, it would be a betrayal of that child I was, who had and has no other advocate than myself. It would be as if I was saying to her, “they were right about you. Everyone treated you like a disease because you deserved it.” And I simply couldn’t do that.
But just knowing the reason wasn’t enough. Hate to post this on such an atheistical board, but what changed me was God. Perceiving that the infinite and timeless love of God sustained my life both then and now made it possible for me to let go of the job I had set for myself of carrying the burden of that grudge to my grave. I gave over to God the responsibility of continuing to understand and care for that child-who-was, and moved on with my life.
I haven’t forgotten anything, and I have boundaries, but I no longer carry the burden. And that is what a grudge, it’s a burden. It blinds you to the present, it keeps you from peace. It closes and shrinks your heart.
I still don’t know what “forgiveness” is. But I think that resentment can be like an addiction. It fills some true need, just in a destructive way. And like an addiction, to be healed you can’t replace it with another addiction, it has to just drop away. You replace it with space.
Oh good fucking god this is why people go crazy getting married. There are eight chairs at a table. Eight. If there are nine of your precious cohort somebody is sitting somewhere else! And it didn’t even occur to me that anybody would care about table 13, and for a minute I freaked out about it just now, and then I realized that that is some stupid bullshit there.
But this is why we finally decided to just sit at a table with our parents and nobody else at it, because surely nobody is going to get butthurt over that.
My father drove me into a workstudy position, because he wanted more of his $$ back, and becasue multi-tasking was something I never had top learn growing up, it was disasterous. And because my mother had no other recourse, she was forced to go along with it.
I must be the only bad person in this thread.
Personally I never forgive, and I never forget.
I don’t spend my days eaten up with hatred of people who have commited past wrongs.
I am a happy, outgoing, sociable person with a richness of good friends.
But if someone does something malevloent against me I retaliate quickly and effectively if possible, or put it on the backburner and basically forget about it until an opportunity arrives where I can do payback.
In the real world that opportunity may never occur, but I don’t beat myself up about it.
Maybe that makes me a bad person.
But at least I’m an honest one.
Sorry, upon reflection this was a bit harsh. It’s just that, damn, people will get upset about anything at a wedding and hold it against you for the rest of your life!
I agree with your rant, Zsofia. A wedding is a freaking party. Just fucking enjoy the party instead of focusing on this petty bullshit. And that goes for guests as well as the bride and groom and their parents. Just freaking relax.
I love that. Thank you.
You call it God, I call it presence, but really it is just space. Not an empty space, but a peaceful space. And realizing that the world really is bigger than you makes letting go a lot easier.
But if they are butthurt, they will pop up in a clown mask one day while you are showering and dismember you. Unlikely, but it happens.
I used to get home from work (at a toxic cesspool of advertising salespeople…), and be all up in arms about the latest injustice. My wife would glance up at me, cut off my ranting with “Just shake it off” and she’d mime being a dog getting dry.
Soon I’d learned to come home and answer “How was work?” with the shaking action “Rrrrrrrrrr”. It must’ve helped: I now play poker with a couple of the worst offenders from back then.
I am a major grudge holder.I didn’t used to be but 3 yrs of an emotionally/mentally abusive relationship did me in. I know it’s awful, but like stated previously I almost find resentment to be an addiction. Most of all I know that this resentment gives me some sort of fake allowance to do whatever the hell I want because “I’ve been wronged!” I’m extremely petulant in this way and I can’t wait to go to therapy to sort this shit out, because being angry/resentful doesn’t hurt anyone but yourself.
I don’t hold grudges. It doesn’t mean I’ll line back up to let someone hurt me again, but I don’t seek out chances to get people back.
For me, sometimes it can be a challenge, sometimes forgiveness is like a living thing and you have to nuture it a little, remind yourself that you are letting that go.
Some of my family members though, are champion grudge-holders. One of them has cut two people out of his life, one over a perceived lawn-chair theft, and one over a thoughtless comment.
I do agree with you that probably nobody meant any harm by seating someone at table 13. I have to disagree though about the group of nine. I’d have put four at one table and five at another, rather than leaving one out of the group.
Still, not worth the ninth dwelling on for years and years…
Maybe the ninth can, you know, make some new friends? Maybe she was put at that table because the hostess knew the people there didn’t know many people and they thought she was a good conversationalist? And since it’s a family wedding the people at Table 13 were probably also family? It wouldn’t even occur to me that putting one cousin out of nine with, say, some aunts and uncles, or (and this was an issue at one of my cousin’s weddings) her own husband and son would be an issue.