Write It Off
We need a way to get past the hurts done to us, even when we can't (and shouldn't) forgive
No matter what your opinion is about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock on Oscar night, one thing is certain -- Will Smith is indeed sorry for it. He's apologized publicly not once, but twice so far. And who knows who he's delivered mea culpas to in private. He is being perfectly clear about his assumption of responsibility for the incident. And yet, he apparently has not been forgiven.
Usually such contrition is met with lots of groundswell around the idea that the person who is sorry should be forgiven. Certainly there are a number of people who have done wrong things (usually white men) who have *not* apologized or have given half-assed apologies, yet have been held up as examples of how society should forgive a person, even if they have not asked for it. Because somehow forgiveness is such a wonderful and powerful thing that it must happen even if the person who has done wrong has not apologized and never intends to.
Bullshit.
I've written in the past extensively on what forgiveness is and what it isn't. To summarize, forgiveness is not a gift, a thing that we give unbidden based upon our own generosity. Forgiveness is the absolving of a social debt owed by the offending party, who has done something that has hurt the person who is being asked to forgive. When a person who understands the weight of their debt has that debt genuinely forgiven, that can be a very beautiful thing that provides great healing to the forgiven and the forgiver. Forgiving someone who does not acknowledge that they have done wrong, or who is actively trying to minimize what they did is "cheap grace," and it does very little solve or heal anything. And to claim that we "owe" someone forgiveness is to stand forgiveness on its head. No one is obligated to forgive someone who has wronged them, even if they ask for it. That's not how that works.
Put simply, this whole business you see in memes saying that you must forgive so you can heal? Nope. Fuck no. No way.
You are not obligated to provide cheap grace to those who have wronged you. It doesn't make you more dignified or happier. It certainly provides no justice or satisfaction. It actually rewards a sense of entitlement on the part of the forgiven (who is usually way too entitled in the first place). It perpetuates exactly the kinds of power dynamics that have supported so much injustice over the years. Those that do wrong feel comfortable in their belief that they may continue to do wrong, knowing that their victims will show up to "be the better person" and forgive them, even as they concede nothing and take no responsibility for what happened, or the harm they caused.
In the end, cheap grace leaves a harmful person on the loose, and leaves the person they harmed still in injury. Worse yet, the injured person is being encouraged to comfort themselves with a weaksauce idea that the ability to forgive has provided them with some kind of spiritual brownie points that somehow make them a "better person." It's really a close cousin to spiritual bypassing, also known as toxic positivity -- another weaksauce idea that tries to tell people to ignore real pain, real injustice and real negativity in favor of hollow promises that focusing on "love and light" will make everything better. Trivializing a person's pain has never really helped them to heal from it.
And yet, the problem still remains that some people are never going to own their shit, and are never going to apologize. Their debt remains on the ledger. The hurt that was never atoned for, the absence of the apology provides a constant reminder of the pain of the harm that was done. If we don't forgive, how do we put that pain behind us in a way that does not stoke the entitlement of the offending party, but does allow us to let go and heal?
The answer lies with your accountant.
I know the conventional wisdom says that accountants are boring, but honestly, they aren't. All that attention to detail can actually be quite exciting and useful when put to the right cause. And that's true here as I draw on an accounting principle called "writing off." Writing off a debt starts with the fact that you owe a debt. When you don't pay what you owe, the company will start doing things to try and collect on that debt. They call you, and remind you of the debt, and ask you to pay it. They may refer the debt to a collection agency to see if the agency can harass you into paying your debt. And they continue to carry the unpaid debt on their balance sheet in their assets column, to show that they have money owed to them that they expect to get. Most companies will do this for about two years.
But at some point, the company decides that the time and energy and cost of trying to get you to pay your debt is too much. They "write off" the debt -- proclaim that the value to them of the debt is zero, and they are writing it off their balance sheet and concluding that the line item that incurred the debt is a full-on loss. This of course will mean a few things. The first is that they will stop putting any time and energy and expense into trying to collect the debt. The second is that they will officially proclaim the debt a loss. The last is that they will probably never do business with the debtor again, given that the last transaction ended up a loss. This usually has impact on the debtor's credit score, which will affect the debtor's ability to obtain credit elsewhere in the community, and if the debt is large enough, the IRS might even record that written off debt as income to the debtor, who may then be legally required to pay taxes on it.
I think that this framework can work with people, too. It's hard when we know we are owed an apology or when someone who needs to own their shit doesn't. The desire to hold on to that sense that we are owed something is strong, and if you hold on too hard to the way you were injured, it can inhibit healing. Often the things we need most to heal a hurt aren’t really about the harm done. Tending wounds rarely involves interacting with the device that inflicted them. You treat an open knife wound not by interacting with the knife, but by removing it and then suturing the open wound.
The desire for dignity is strong too, however, and valid, particularly where the harm is substantial. A rape victim should not have to forgive their rapist. A person who has been deceived and defrauded of their life savings should not have to forgive the person who stole from them. The person who was assaulted by a police officer because of racial profiling should not have to forgive the officer. Extracting forgiveness from a person who does not wish to give it for a harm that is traumatic is cruel.
But what if the injury just isn't that bad? I mean, what if it's something comparatively trivial, like forgetting a birthday or accidentally breaking a dish? Well, that's a case where the "loss" in question already has comparatively little value. The truth is most people already "write off" those kinds of injuries, because they simply never hurt all that much to begin with. Investing any time and energy into getting the person who owes you an apology to give you one when the injury is that small simply doesn't make sense even as an initial matter. Those are the moments where even if they DID apologize, you are very likely to tell them not to worry about it, and genuinely mean it.
When the hurt really IS substantial, engaging in a mental practice that "writes off" the debt without forgiving it can supply the space for a person to heal without coddling the person who did the harm, and in practice looks a lot like the accounting procedure, with three basic elements:
Stop trying to collect what is owed you. You don't have to pretend you aren't owed an apology, you just have to stop actively looking for it to actually arrive. This means avoiding the expenditure of your time and energy to remembering the line and shape of the hurt caused to you. This means not looking for karma to collect on your debt for you. It means not looking for opportunities to deliver the comeuppance that the person who harmed you deserves. Don't give the incident, or the debt you are owed because of it, any more of your precious time and energy. Sure, this is easier than it looks, particularly if you are dealing with trauma as a result of the injury. This may require the help of a qualified therapist. Most of all, it will require time, patience, and discipline. Most importantly, understand that nurturing and healing yourself is a categorically different activity from remembering and focusing on who hurt you and how. If a person hits you in the jaw, hitting them back, or even screaming "HEY, YOU HIT ME!" doesn't do a damn thing about the fact that your jaw is swollen and you need an ice pack.
Proclaim the debt a loss. Usually the harm you have suffered means you are in pain. You lost something that mattered to you, and it hurts. Sometimes it's physical functionality -- you got kicked in the stomach and now you can do nothing but bend double and wince and cry. Sometimes it's a sense of safety or love -- your boyfriend lied and cheated on you and now you no longer feel cared for and you can't trust him. That which you lost must be acknowledged, properly mourned, and then set aside. This too might require some time and even professional help to fully achieve. A person who was abused as a child by a parent, for instance, often needs time to fully understand the full depth of the harm that was caused.
It's not just the physical or mental anguish from the abusive behavior. There is also usually a loss of trust and paranoia, because the one person who was supposed to love and protect you chose instead to use you as their punching bag. The full weight of a loss might take weeks or years to understand. But the work of understanding what you have lost and mourning its passage will get you eventually to a place where you do not feel the pain as readily or intensely. It may never go away, but at least it has been properly seen and set to one side. It is no longer at the center of who you are, informing all your other thoughts and actions.
Cut the debtor off from future access. Even people who try to sell you on the idea that you need to forgive all the time will often tell you that forgiving and forgetting are two different things. You are not under any obligation to permit someone who harmed you access to the means to hurt you again. You also don't need to be silent about the fact that you were injured. We often worry a lot, particularly in witch communities, about harming people's reputations, and about starting "witch wars" and about gossip. And it's true that gossip and talking about people behind their backs is destructive and creates a lot of strife.
And there is a big difference between character assassination and acknowledging the truth of your own experience. "I don't want to associate with X, because they harmed me in this way..." is a person speaking their truth. It is not the same thing as "I heard X did this thing to Y and now they won't associate with X." That is gossip, and not your business. That said, a person is not entitled to have people think well of them. While there may be more to the story, and sure, people deserve a chance to show they can be more than what others say about them, in the end, the thing that will hold a person back isn't that they fucked up, it's that they still try to pretend they didn't. The fact that a person doesn't want to own their shit doesn't mean it doesn't stink. Sooner or later, someone's going to ask "what's that smell?"
The most important thing about "writing someone off" however, is that we call it that, and acknowledge it is something different from "forgiveness." There is certainly a time and a place for forgiveness. When the person who harmed you acknowledges what they did and is contrite about it, certainly that opens a door to forgiving the wrong done. And that forgiving can be very healing for both the forgiver and the forgiven. Again, real forgiveness is a worthy and beautiful thing.
I am not against the act of forgiveness. I just don't think it's mandatory, and in some cases, it is even destructive. I believe we pressure people into forgiving even when they don't want to or shouldn't because conflict makes us uncomfortable. So forgiveness has become something that often people do to prove how nice and socially compliant they are. Forgiveness given without contrition might create a quick papering over of a conflict, but it does nothing to protect the person harmed, does nothing to assure the offending person really understands their offense, and sets it up for all the harm and conflict to happen all over again. Maybe worse next time.
In this day and age, often the people who hurt us do so without even knowing it, or don't care that they have caused the harm. Whether the failure to own their behavior is a product of neglect or malice, the fact is, you're hurt, and you're left dealing with all the physical and emotional consequences. The debt is on the ledger, and not being able to collect on it works its own kind of ongoing injury. "Writing them off" provides a much more balanced way of moving past that injury with a clear heart and one's dignity intact. It’s an alternative to forgiveness in a society that seems to think forgiveness is always the answer.
So if you can’t forgive, go ahead, write them off. You’ll feel better.