A note on forgiving people you grew up with
I found a raw post I wrote at fifteen, trying to decide whether I could forgive a friend. I won't relitigate it. But it's worth being honest about what that age felt like, and what forgiveness looks like from here.
Going back through my old forum, I found a post I wrote at fifteen titled “Forgiveness.” In it I was trying to talk myself through whether I could forgive a friend after a falling-out, the kind of small, total rupture that mostly only happens when you’re that young.
I’m not going to reprint it or relitigate it. The specifics don’t matter anymore, and the other person was a kid too, doing kid things, same as me. What I want to keep is the feeling, because it was real and it’s worth being honest about. At fifteen, a friendship cooling off did not feel like a small thing. It felt enormous. When you’ve just moved to a new town and you’re still figuring out where you stand, one person not calling back can feel like the whole floor tilting.
Here is what I understand now that I couldn’t then. Most of those ruptures weren’t really about anything. We were all learning how to be people at the same time, in real time, with no practice. The friend who let me down that week was having his own week. And I was surely somebody’s hard-to-forgive friend more than once.
I didn’t have an answer at fifteen. I sort of do now: you forgive it because holding on costs you more than it ever costs them, and because the version of you that was hurting back then would be relieved to know it worked out. It mostly did.
So if you’re fifteen and the floor is tilting: it levels back out. Give it time, and give the other kid a little grace. You’ll both need some from someone eventually.