Why I’ll Never Forgive Some People And It’s Okay

I have been wronged by people close to me in my life. Betrayed by family members. Let down by friends. Taken advantage of for my kindness. These things happen as people constantly test boundaries with you. It is up to us to reinforce the boundaries that we established and sometimes, that means not forgiving someone. But wait! Aren’t we supposed to forgive? If not for them, for our own sake? Doesn’t forgiveness mean we are good and just people? Not always. Not everyone deserves forgiveness and that’s okay. Even if they did deserve it and you’re not ready yet, that does not make you a bad person. You can also forgive them in one way and never forgive them in another.

I’ve had a few exe’s who I left on bad terms and although I may get upset about what transpired in the past, I have learned to forgive them as persons, but never as boyfriends. What does that mean? I recognize them as flawed human beings who were trying to do the best they could, coping with the traumas from their childhoods, and trying to find a love that they didn’t know how to hold on to. I can forgive them these things because they didn’t know better. However, I can never forgive them as boyfriends because if I did, that would mean I would be able to return to them in the same capacity. There is a finality in that decision because that particular relationship is over as I can’t forgive the things done in it, but I can continue a different one based on friendship.

Is it bad to never forgive them in any capacity? Some people preach forgiveness for our souls, but that’s not what forgiveness is. Forgiveness means letting it completely go, but it’s okay to reinforce our boundaries and say we don’t let that ish slide. We need to learn to protect ourselves first before we worry about how we affect others. That doesn’t mean we can’t learn to understand the person and why they made the decisions they did, but just because we have compassion for them doesn’t mean we would let them back into our lives. Forgiveness is a complicated thing, but if we view it as boundaries that serve to protect us, we should then honor our forgiveness and not dole it out frequently.

I understand why the people in my life did the things they did. I have compassion for them as human beings and as a flawed person myself who is constantly learning, I know we are on the same journey, but I also recognize I don’t need to forgive their actions if they have crossed my boundaries and that’s okay. At the end of the day, if you are at peace with the decisions you have made, you have made the right ones. If you question if you have hurt others with your decisions, remind yourself of what your boundaries are. I mourn the loss of the relationships that I cannot forgive, but I hope you the best in your journey where ever you are. I hope you get there some day.

The New America

An 18-year-old gunman killed 21 students and teachers in Uvalde. The Supreme Court overturned Roe V. Wade. Covid-19 is still rampant as people let down their guards. Catastrophe after cataclysmic catastrophe, we are reminded of how divided we are and how slow change is to come by. Some of us are protesting for change after seeing the devastation that has befallen us. Some of us think this is status quo and par for the course all the while claiming that our country still needs to be great again. No one is happy where we are and as such, we all suffer. The truth is that it is not laws that will change our nation, but rather our notions about equality. If half of us are okay with people dying and living in poverty, then our laws will never change. Laws are useful, but even more horrifying is the thought that many of our neighbors don’t want to see change because they don’t want to see others benefitting before them.

Many times, we ask why there isn’t meaningful reform and change, but the reality is that this future has been engineered by men in the shadows whose vision has lived long beyond them. This is their America. They planted a seed before many of us even took our first breath. They shifted minds to believe Unions were not beneficial and that abortion is not medical health. They let Whites believe racism was made up and that slavery was not as bad as it was. They led many to believe that anyone could pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they just tried hard enough and this resulted in: redlining, gerrymandering, exorbitant campaign donations, and school districts being funded by local neighborhoods, creating richer and poorer schools that benefitted those who lived in certain neighborhoods.

The issue is not the laws. The laws are the result of the seeds that were planted many years ago. The true, underlying issue is many of us grew up believing in individualism and that big government overreaches unless it’s for the things we want. All of this is predicated on a fervent hatred of otherness. They have conditioned our neighbors to believe that the America they once knew is gone and at risk of getting more liberal and they must harness their hatred to make sure it doesn’t change. Things are literally going their way. Roe V. Wade was overturned. There are currently no meaningful gun laws, and yet, they still believe they are under attack and liberals are all to blame. The reality is they can never be content because they wouldn’t have their hatred to fuel them anymore.

Change is on the horizon, but our deep-seated racism, which we refuse to acknowledge, will always bubble up if we don’t teach actual history and instead bemoan that Confederate monuments built by the United Daughters of the Confederacy are being taken down. If we don’t tackle mindsets and beliefs first of White Nationalism, bigotry, hatred of LGBTQ, and more, those beliefs will continue to live on and become the new America.

When You Know You’re Not the Main Character

I just finished Maid on Netflix and thoroughly enjoyed the limited series and it reminded me of another Netflix show called Hillbilly Elegy that shows a poor, White person who eventually makes it out to become successful. Both shows were based on the real-life stories told by the authors who lived them and it made me ask “Why do people care so much about White people who get out of poverty, but not other minorities?” The answer is that there is a huge market for this poverty-core view that White people love to embrace, but they don’t actually want to see the realities of minorities who are living it. Instead, the narrative of a poor, White person who rises above their station is the quintessential story of “making it in America.” The backbone of our country thrives on this story and pushes this narrative that anyone can make it, so publishers are more eager to pick these books to be made into movies, making the author even richer. However, stories about minorities usually come with racism and they don’t go down as easy, so it’s nicer to see stories that don’t focus on race like The Glass House, another book that was made into a movie about a poor, White person livin’ the dream.

Stephanie Land, the writer of Maid, has written about how minorities experience poverty and sees beyond just her story, but most of America doesn’t. This doesn’t discount the actual lived-experiences of the authors, but asks why their stories are in the spotlight. The public wants stories that can be spoon-fed to them and makes them feel good about themselves. If that girl can make it out of the domestic violence shelter and become a successful author, anyone can do it! Right? I don’t think so. I don’t think that the books of minorities who may go through a similar history are treated the same. Way too much adversity to tackle in a two-hour movie. In America, we want to believe that anything is possible and ignore the history of our country and what those who have been relegated to the thresholds have experienced, so we tend to uphold stories like these to make ourselves feel better. And why are we obsessed with the poor, but ask why they can’t help themselves? Morgan Spurlock lived on minimum wage with his girlfriend in his documentary 30 Days and Barbara Ehrenreich did the same for her book Nickled and Dimed. We want to watch poor people as they are entertainment, but distance ourselves when they ask for help.

Once gain, all these people are White because it is easier to hear the message of the down-trodden when it comes from those who look like you. And in the end, we all know Morgan and Barbara were only cosplaying as poor people and not actually poor, so we don’t have to really feel sorry for them. This White perspective colors a lot of things that people don’t always catch right away. Movies like Sicario and Wind River show a White protagonist who must enter a world they don’t understand and try to make sense of it. Although at the surface, it may be trying to show us a world we have not seen before, it actually makes alien this world that we don’t know. It tells us time and time again that they are the outsiders and you need a translator to even begin to understand what’s happening. Even when the story opens on a White person entering a minority space, it is centered on the White person and as such, relegates the characters of that minority to the sidelines.

What does that mean? We live in a world where if you’re a minority, your story is not heard over the stories of your White counterparts and when it is, you’re not the main character. And everyone loves to see people make it out of poverty, but they also relish watching people go through poverty knowing either that they’ll make it out eventually or that they’re not actually poor. Minorities have always known that their voices were silenced and have lost out opportunities when they had the same skill sets, but it can become so glaring when we see how media views the treatment of people who are just pretending to be poor. Because when it comes down to it, we don’t want to see poor people just being poor and we certainly don’t want to see people of color being poor because there are implications as to why they are poor. And as such, we continue to try to push the narrative that anyone can make it in America if you just try hard enough and when we’re confronted with data that people can’t make it on minimum wage, we just shrug and look the other way. Oh look, a new movie is out.

Remembering 9/11 as a Minority

I distinctly remember that infamous day in American history when two planes crashed into the World Trade Center. I was 18 and happy to finally be an adult away at college. I was working in the library early in the morning when my boss came in to tell us that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I was in disbelief and shock. I didn’t know how to react because nothing of such magnitude had ever occurred on American soil in my lifetime. I remember still going to class, but being in a fog as everyone didn’t know what to say or do in the aftermath. People worried about the stock market and my roommate said her father had told her we would be okay as long as everyone stayed calm. I remember seeing Maya Angelou on the news and remembering why? In this moment of great fear, even the news had no idea what to do, so they put someone comforting on. Nothing made sense in that moment.

What was also on my mind was xenophobia. After the shock and worry subsided, my mind wandered to the hijackers. In my heart of hearts, I hoped they wouldn’t be Asian. Because if they were, I knew my life would no longer be the same. When I found out they weren’t, I was relieved, then felt guilty because I knew someone else would be the target of American hate, and they were. I heard stories of neighbors seething and vengeful as they stood outside of Muslim and Indian-born citizens’ homes. I read about a Sikh man who was mistaken for Muslim, who was targeted and killed. And I’d heard that a Hmong teenager had made an off-hand comment that no one Hmong cared that 3,000 people died because it didn’t affect us, and the deep-seated racism that had been so carefully concealed came out. Because of one young individual’s comment, people were emboldened to be racist towards people like me. It seemed this tragic act had resurrected a long-simmering hate that barely boiled beneath many American’s blood and they felt as if they were doing their duty by accosting those they deemed responsible for the fear that permeated their lives.

That is the fate of a minority who lives in a country where the majority of it’s people are White. I don’t blame White people in general, but I hold them responsible for not understanding that as the majority in control, they also control the narrative of who belongs and who doesn’t, and through this experience, I knew I would never belong. I would always be an outsider. I was not free to only mourn what had happened, but as a minority, I knew immediately that there would be consequences and I feared what would happen. For months after, I read about stories of Muslim women who did not wear their headscarf because they feared retaliation, even though they had nothing to do with the crashes. Looking back, I see how unfair that was for me. I knew that even in the midst of a national tragedy, I still had to worry about my own safety and those around me because they would never consider me one of them.

People will always act out of fear because it is who we are. And it’s easier to root our fears in racism than it is to dismantle what we’ve been told and believed all of our lives about who the enemy is. It’s been 20 years and I wonder if we’ve learned any lessons from the past. Are we any different than who we were on that fateful day? I honestly don’t know if we are and perhaps we may never be, but I hope we can change.

Photo by Aaron Lee on Unsplash

Who is Abortion for?

Who is abortion for? Recently, with the bills passed in Texas, abortion has become a hotly contested issue again as women’s rights to their bodies are once again challenged. If women can’t have the choice to choose abortion after 6 weeks, they are then forced to have the child regardless of their circumstances, which could be rape, incest, a birth anomaly, or the safety of the mother’s life. Some pro-life people say we should be thinking about the rights of the unborn child, but are they thinking about the safety of the mother? Or are they simply looking to control the narrative about what women can and can’t do? There are varying reasons why some are anti-choice and that may include: their religious beliefs, their political leanings, or simply pure misogyny.

On Facebook, a man commented that it’s not the baby’s fault that women decided to open their legs for a momentary pleasure while thinking they didn’t have to deal with the consequences of that act, completely denying that a man was also involved in that transaction. In that comment, what he is implying is that a woman is solely responsible for when she has sex, regardless of if she was raped, coerced, or unconscious. He is stating that women are responsible for their pleasure, while men are not. If this isn’t good old misogyny, I don’t know what is. I once had a talk with a man about abortion, where he got belligerently upset because I said that sometimes it’s a mistake and women need a choice. He, very red-faced, asked me if it was a mistake he decided to have his children instead of aborting them. Like really? Did you really just make a women’s issue that didn’t affect you at all about YOU?

And so I ask, who is abortion for? Let me tell you about my mother. My mother is a devout Christian who once chastised a young girl for having an abortion. She believes deeply in her faith and does not believe in abortion. She believes abortion is the act of killing a baby. However, when my mother was in her older years and pregnant with her 7th child, she thought about it. She THOUGHT about it. She decided not to go through with it, but she thought about it, and that’s who abortion is for. It’s a choice and and I’d hate to think what situation my mother would be in if she didn’t have that choice. Abortion is for everyone and everyone should have the option, regardless if they are going to choose it or not. For more often than not, even those that fight fiercely against it, like my mother, need it more than they care to express.

Photo by 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

Why Don’t We Care About Each Other?

There is a housing market boom right now, where prices are skyrocketing. The house we bought in 2018 is now valued at an extra $30,000. I don’t know if we could’ve afforded the house then if at that price. Then, I decided to look at what one bedrooms were renting at in our area and saw them going for $600.00. I paid $450.00 about 5 years ago. Of course, I have to expect that prices will go up, but I worry still. I worry about twenty-something me that worked two part-time, minimum-wage jobs after she moved home after the 2008 recession. How could she have afforded rent for what she was earning? Would she have been able to save anything? She already didn’t have that much to begin with. And I worry about people like her who are currently in that situation.

Every day, I see new apartment buildings made of concrete and glass rise from the ground and I know they were not designed for those who are living near the poverty line. Instead, the poor have to rely on Section 8 housing, which some see as a hand-out. What the detractors don’t realize is that landlords must agree to the vouchers in the first place and many do not. Where does this leave a city that is growing and prospering, but leaving its poorest behind? I myself live very comfortably and now have a great job that I love, but still, I worry about that girl that I used to be. She wasn’t lazy. She didn’t take hand-outs. She worked her ass off and barely made it. It’s easy to generalize the plight of others when we don’t personally know them, but sometimes, what they genuinely need is help.

Housing is a crucial element of life and we have been reduced to the haves and the have-nots. The haves scorn the have-nots and tell them to get a job, get a degree, work harder, and to get off employment, while the have-nots cannot wait until they can tell those that come after them the same thing. We, as a society, are sorely broken and it’s much harder to fix than just policies and laws. The policies that are enacted may help those who need it, but it does not help those who continue to feel that those who are poor deserve it. What have we become when we don’t care about hungry children and homeless parents? There is a problem and it is us. It is our entitlement.

Entitlement is not the belief that we are owed housing, health care, and mental health, but rather, the issue is that we think we’re entitled to the wealth we’ve gained and earned, making us feel as we belong in a different caste. Entitlement is asking where our tax payer money is going to when it could be helping our next-door neighbor who just lost her job. It is telling others to pull themselves up by their bootstraps when we forgot the struggles we had to get where we are. It’s in the way we talk about those who need help and those who want to help them. We say they are bottom-feeders and leeches, giving them no sympathy. When we differentiate ourselves from them, we feel entitled to our own situation and dehumanize them in the process.

If we don’t care about each other, there will be no one left to care about who we are. What is our legacy going to be at the end? What will they say about us? They were selfish until the very end. The human race died out because they couldn’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The bootstraps were never the problem. The system is most likely to blame. However, it all comes down to the common denominator of caring for others that are not us. If we don’t realize that we’re all in this together, we’ll see ourselves splinter more and more and we’ll be the ones left behind.

Photo by Jordy Meow on Unsplash

Women Who Are Attracted to Chaos

I’ve known women who seem to constantly be embroiled in chaos and destruction. Everyone experiences some level of drama at some point in their lives, but there are some who can never seem to outrun drama. There are those who enjoy it and court dysfunction in their lives, but then there are those who appear seemingly normal except for the men they chose in their lives. These women are the backbone of the family and the only thing standing between total destruction and a sliver of hope. They appear to be strong, independent women who just always pick the wrong guy. It’s so maddening to see such beautiful women choose these type of men over and over again, but what we don’t realize is the chaos already exists in her.

I’ve had friends like this, where I agonized over their mistreatment. Women who never tried to make a big deal of the situation. Women who endured years of abuse while working, tending to children, and running a household. And women who were hard workers. This is not the same situation as women who are beaten into submission or are too young to understand what is happening to them. I’m talking about women who chose time and time again to enter into relationships that they know are unhealthy. Most women in abusive situations eventually understand they don’t deserve that kind of abuse and leave, but not those who are attracted to chaos.

Those who are attracted to chaos keep choosing dysfunctional relationships because it masks the dysfunction in them. If they constantly have to worry about their partner, they don’t have to stop to think about their own pain and dysfunction. These women have encountered a lot of hurt in their formative years and don’t know how to deal with it except to appear strong. To the world, they look as if they could take on an army, but internally, they feel as if they deserve to be treated like they are less than human, so they stay. And if they leave, they choose the same type of person because they are used to that type of destruction.

It’s so maddening to watch this happen to those you’ve cared for in your lives, but if they are not willing to work on themselves, they will not work on building boundaries in their relationships. All you can do is be there for them when they need someone to listen and care for them. We can never change people we are so frustrated with because we see that the answer is clearly right in front of them, but the decision is not ours to make. And what I’ve learned is that these women don’t need lectures or condemnations, but acceptance. They just need to understand that they need to accept themselves.

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

What Cardi B Taught me About Feminism and Racism

I used to not like Cardi B. She’s loud. Ostentatious. Overtly sexually suggestive in her lyrics. But what was it really? I didn’t like her because deep down, I felt as if she didn’t deserve to be where she was. She was just a stripper who happened to have one hit song and now, she was a mega-star. And then it all changed when I saw her in a live session. She talked about her haters. Especially the women. Women like me. She asked why did we hate her so much. She said instead of hating me for getting here, why don’t you see that if I can do it, you can do it, too? And that changed my whole perspective. She was right. Her words forced me to look introspectively and really examine why I disliked a woman who was simply trying to make it in a world that was not made for her. Why I couldn’t support someone who talked the way she did, dressed the way she did, and made money the way she did. I realized that I didn’t like her because subconsciously, I thought I was better than her.

Deep down, I thought I was better than her. I thought that since I didn’t strip, reveal my body, and sexualize myself through songs that I was somehow better than she was. And if I was better than she was, I deserved more than her. I felt it wasn’t fair that that someone like her could make it and I couldn’t, but her words made me realize my thinking was inherently wrong. I wasn’t better than her. I was simply different, but that didn’t mean I had to demonize her for how she portrayed herself. That’s the thing about feminism sometimes. Sometimes, we pigeonhole who we are and exclude those that don’t fit our view about who we believe is a successful woman. Megan Fox stated this as she said she didn’t feel welcomed by feminists and this resonates with me. Feminism is not just about fighting for women’s equality amongst men, but fighting against our own biases against other women. This freed me in a way that I never felt before. I could look at women like Cardi B and Megan Fox and just appreciate them for who they were instead of what my idea of a strong woman should be.

I then made the correlation between my sexism and racism that was profound. I realized that racists are racist because they also feel as if they are better than the minorities they hate. They are looking at successful minorities and angry that they themselves are not at that level because deep down, they feel as if they are better than them. This core belief of thinking that we are better than someone else is primal. It’s not only confined to sex, race, ethnicity, or sexual preference, but can include a multitude of things that we are not aware of it. It’s natural to assume that the group you belong to is the superior group because you belong to it and this belief causes us to segregate others and elevate ourselves in the process. What we need to do is to acknowledge that we can work through them. To deny these notions is to deny feelings that predate who we are. We need to acknowledge that it’s okay to feel resentful and angry, but the next step is to talk about them. Racism and sexism are never going to go away because they are a part of who we are, but to deny that we are no longer these things perpetuates the myth that there is no real problem.

I have so much more sympathy for Cardi B and women like her now. When I see her, I feel joy. When I confronted my own feelings of inadequacies, it allowed me to be able to support women that were different from me. I don’t always agree with everything she does, but it doesn’t affect my support of her. We are never quite done learning as long as we know we can keep an open mind. And in doing so, we also need to forgive ourselves for what we’ve condoned in the past. Change can be mercurial, but change is always bound to come our way. It’s just a matter of if we accept it or not.

The Secret to What Men Want: A Review of The Robber Bride

Zenia, the title character in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Robber Bride, is a charismatic and beautiful woman who knows just what it takes to steal the hearts of taken men. The heroines of the book, Tony, Roz, and Charis, don’t quite understand what witchcraft she uses to cast a spell on their men and lure them to their deaths as a sea siren would to lovelorn shipmates. And because she remains enigmatic and elusive ’til the end, we know nothing of who she is either, as we are left to wonder what compels a woman to steal others and what does she possess that men willingly leave their loved ones for her? I have faced women like Zenia before, friends in sheep’s clothing, who are really wolves who bare their teeth when a man is introduced. This type of woman is broken, but also sure of who they are; so sure that they feel they can take whomever they want.

In the book, Zenia tells tall tales of what her past may have been, making the heroines feel as if they must defend and protect her, but what really is the past of a woman such as this? Women like Zenia steal their friend’s husbands because they crave love and acceptance and get a rush when a man leaves his wife/girlfriend for her because they feel it must mean they are better than them. These women feel as if they are just as good or better than them if they are chosen by the man, which is a false equivalency, but one they believe nonetheless. Typically, they know their worth because the outside world and men constantly barrage them with these things. They know their strengths lie in their beauty and their presence, so they use these tools to their advantage. However, they have no sense of worth internally, so they try to fill this chasm up with things that don’t belong to them. To take another woman’s man is to take her sense of worth and in it, boost hers; but it never lasts long because that chasm opened when they were young and is a separate issue. These women were hurt by the absence or neglect of their fathers, and as such, they seek a forbidden love when they grow up to try to replace it.

I know those girls didn’t really want my boyfriend. They wanted the promise of getting him, which entailed becoming someone who was loved, but because they didn’t love themselves, they could scarcely accept that same love in return. That is why Zenia never loved any of the men she stole, because she was never looking for love. She wanted to be loved, but she didn’t want to love. To love means to be vulnerable, and she knew she would never be vulnerable again because she’d been hurt so much in the past. And then the real question rears its head: What did she have that all these men wanted? What was her secret? She knew how to have them best fulfill their role as protector, which made them feel good about themselves. When you make a person feel as if they have succeeded in their role, they will adore you.

What is the role of a man in a hetero-normative relationship? Is it always to be the protector? Isn’t that misogynistic? It definitely is. Unfortunately, society has bequeathed the role of provider and protector unto men and nurturer unto women and this is something that we still need to contend with, but we also need to acknowledge that it deeply affects who we are as of today. In situations where one spouse falls seriously ill, more men than women tend to leave the ill spouse. In one case of study participants, the divorce rate was 21 percent for the husbands of seriously ill women and 3 percent for the wives of seriously ill men. I don’t think men have any less compassion than women. The issue here is that men have been conditioned to be protectors and when their wives are dying of cancer, they feel helpless as if they have failed their jobs, so they leave. It’s easier to be alone than it is to be reminded of your failures when you look at your sick wife. This is not a condemnation of men, but of what society has ingrained into us who we should be and what our purpose is.

Zenia, and women like her, know this. Perhaps they know more because they saw their fathers leave. Or they know that most people want to love, but they don’t care about being loved back. Because of their unique position where they can’t accept love, they can cater to the whims of their beloved without being beholden to them. They understand that their worth lies in how they make men and others feel about themselves. Zenia not only plays men, but also the women, making them feel worthy of tending to her. In the end, it’s simply not about what men want, but what everyone wants. The secret is to know what exactly it is that each person is looking for to feel better about themselves, and that is what Zenia knows.

The Mindset Revolution

Retraining how you think.