I recently read something that has lodged itself deeply into my brain.

“Forgive them even if they’re not sorry.”

Um, what?

Nowhere in my personal revenge fantasies has someone ever not been deeply sorry. By the time I was done with them, they were beyond sorry. They were ruined. Whether I threw a drink in their face in front of astonished laughing friends, or denied them entrance to a coveted party, or delivered a perfectly-timed cutting remark (remember, these are fantasies), my targets were always sorry in the end. And at that point, I could graciously deign to forgive them if I so chose.

It never occurred to me that someone might not be sorry for what they did. Ever. Not only that, that they might actually be mad at me for getting in the way of obtaining something they wanted. A job, say. Or a spouse.

Some individuals have an entirely different storyline playing in their heads than the one that is playing out in the (rational) world. You may have been cast as someone’s villain even if you don’t know them. Or a barrier to be removed at any cost. A barnacle to be scraped from their ship, an itching skin tag on the membrane of their ultimate happiness. In these instances a person might do things you never thought possible: hurtful things, vengeful, breathtakingly cruel acts that seem almost Shakespearean in scope. But because you are just a barnacle, a rock in a shoe, you must not have feelings. Who apologizes to a rock?

So say someone does something horrible to you, and they are unrepentant, or perhaps have even become angry at you — the mute, stupid rock — because the thing they did to sabotage you failed to yield the expected results. This is your fault, and you must be punished. So they forge ahead with new acts of lunacy in the hopes of reaching their intended goal. To try and stop them would be akin to reasoning with a drunk person, or a toddler. And still you are supposed to forgive them (and of course remove any connections that allow them access to you), because not doing so will slowly give you a disease and really will not hurt the other person in the slightest. The whole, “drinking poison and expecting the rat to die,” blah blah blah.

Forgiveness is freedom. Intellectually this makes sense. In practice it does not feel as satisfying as the revenge fantasy. But the satisfaction from these thoughts is short-lived and the constant replaying of them is, frankly, exhausting. And juvenile.

It sucks, but you might never get an apology no matter how much you and your support angel dream team of friends and family thinks you deserve one. You can’t wait for it. Your life is too precious. You do not want to morph into one of those weird paranoid people who sits on a park bench and rehashes the same bitter story over and over to a group of pigeon-confidantes bribed with breadcrumbs to sit and listen.

So forgiveness is pretty good revenge in the end, and if one of your fantasies also comes true somewhere down the line, without any effort on your part, then that’s just gravy.

Namaste.