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Dear Bolu,
What prompts us to seek forgiveness from people?
All ego, pride, and laziness aside, we ask people for forgiveness or tender an apology to them when we become aware that our words or actions have (possibly) hurt them. The keywords here are "aware" and "hurt"—and both are essential requirements for a full forgiveness contract.
We can come into awareness of our "wrongdoing" in two ways. The first is by ourselves. Some actions are tellingly hurtful in some way—say spilling coffee on a mate's laptop or breaking their favourite mug. In such cases, it's obvious that you need to apologize for what you did. No one needs to tell you.
In other cases, however, we are oblivious of our wrong. We need the offended or someone else to show us the error of our ways. It could be that we are being insensitive and we need to take more care to observe the effect of our actions. It could also be that it's impossible to know we hurt them. In our heads, we could be doing them a massive favour but to them, that could be the most unreasonable and despicable thing.
Our friends and the people around us are the special unlucky souls for whom we reserve our subtlest and deepest hurtful actions. Subtle because we don't require Machiavellian manoeuvres to terrorize them. We needn't come up with an elaborate scheme to get them tripped, trapped, or ticked off. The littlest thing—say refusing to apologize for a wrong we did—could infinitely hurt them. And when they offend us without apologizing, we sometimes severely punish them without letting them know we've been offended. Stupid, right? But we do this a lot. And we can hurt them this way simply because they are our friends.

We stop talking to them. We stop returning their texts. We no longer reply their messages with emojis. Our tone is rough and brash and our presence is distant, disconnected, and removed. We stop adding an extra piece of chicken when we serve them. We don't send them birthday messages. We replace "okaay" with "k" and "that's lovely to know" with "nice". We post a picture we'd ordinarily send to them personally. We don't tell them of our plans. We say we're too tired for sex. Just imagine! Ah, these terrible, terrible little things. We know it hurts them. We can't hurt people we dislike that way. And that's because our friends are more accessible to us than our enemies. We know the people we love much more than we know the people we hate.
Still in that vein, we are more inclined to bear and hold close to our chests, a grudge against people we know than people we've never seen before or can't put a face to. If during a morning rush hour, a stranger spills some coffee on you and makes a break for it, you might feel upset about the situation but you can't hold a grudge against them. You can't add them to your secret, undocumented list of people you are yet to forgive. You don't know them. They are not your friends. You can't hurt them by being angry with them. You only hurt yourself! And that's the curse of the offended.
It's a curse because it is not a blessing. Your morning is ruined, your favourite shirt is compromised, and the promise of a pleasant day at work fades away like a looming mirage. You're angry, visibly. But these valid, negative emotions you feel cannot be directed at the offender because you don't know them. The offender is unaware of the hurt you feel and you can't bring them to that awareness. And it bites you and gnaws at you till you let it go. You're right to be mad but you can do nothing about it.
Similarly, when our friends hurt us and they are genuinely unaware that they hurt us, we can't punish them simply by being mad at them. We feel the curse of the offended. Of course, our anger can result in malice or us treating them unfairly, but our friends can't associate that unfair treatment with the wrong they did because they don't know the wrong they did. To you, you're dishing out what they deserve for hurting you and not apologizing. To them, you're being a bad friend by hurting them without provocation. And that offends them. If you never tell them that they offended you, they would live on happily and you would continue to burden yourself with unhealthy negative emotions.
To lift the curse of the offended, we should let people know they hurt us when they hurt us. This might be difficult because sometimes we feel it is painfully obvious that what they did was hurtful. "There is no way he could think that this didn't hurt me". "How can she not see that she's killing me?". Well, if you've lived long enough, you'd understand that actions are easily misinterpreted and misjudged. Our perspectives are different, as are our judgments. So in our friendships, situationships, and relationships, we should try to communicate with the offender when we feel this curse bearing down on us.
And when someone collides with us on a Monday morning in a hit-and-run coffee spill incident, usually we can do nothing but move on. We should mourn the untimely passing of our favourite shirt and move on, dear friend.
Fin.
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Write you soon, merci !
- Wolemercy