Alright. In the spirit of Ramadan, you’d think that what I am about to write will be soft and kind and gentle and all things forgiving. But it’s not. In fact, it’s quite the opposite of all things gentle. It shall also be very short because you need to know that the entry I wrote about forgiving someone who hasn’t asked for your forgiveness isn’t for everyone. This entry still generates a flurry of emails weekly; it is not for everyone, specifically neither the forgiver nor the forgivee.

It’s not even for me, at all times.

It’s how to behave in an elevated manner, and quite frankly and specifically to me, when I see the asshattery around me, I have no desire to always be ‘elevated’. I retain the right to be a machete when facing any lying, cheating, thieving, oppressing, passive aggressive, eye-rolling abusive fuck-up. And so should you.

There is a fine line between being elevated and being a moron when it comes to letting people get away with shit in your life. You want to be a degenerate pushover?, be my guest; just don’t play the martyr of elevated and enlightened behaviour, and instead make sure to own it and suck it up like a real wo/man.

The bottom line is: there are some people that you will never forgive, whether it’s because you don’t feel like you can actually get past it / they deserve it, or because you can’t be bothered to repeatedly expend the copious amounts of energy required to forgive the actions of someone who never acknowledged or owned the act of lying, cheating, thieving, oppressing, abusing you and your trust all the while, paper-cutting you to death with their passive aggression.

Just make sure that the anger sits in a silo labelled ‘so-and-so’, and it doesn’t spill over on to how you treat anyone else. I expect to be held accountable for my own actions, not that of others. Extend that courtesy to those around you, at least…

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Footnote: Yes. Even the ones we choose not to forgive aren’t born to hurt us. And just because you choose not to forgive someone, it doesn’t mean you’re labelling them ‘evil’.

P.S. Clearly, this is in response to all of the other emails whose sole focus is men / women in a relationship. Just so we’re clear – we do know that people need forgiveness, and people perform fantastical feats of shittiness even beyond the confines of dating, right?

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