Day 7 " What's the most unforgivable thing someone could ever do to you? "
I'd say the upper limit of that, the most unforgivable thing, is murdering me. It stands to reason that I'd be too dead to process what happened, and forgiveness wants a process.
The least thing which still levels off in the plateau of Thou Art Un-Personed…huh. I don't want to say that I follow my emotions all the time, like attack close friends' vulnerabilities with snark whenever I'm hangry, or whenever a television show I like took a turn for the disappointing, and then never apologize "because I honor my feelings" or some other rationalization—but I do check in with my own feelings a lot, because those are a big factor.
For example, back at school I had this dream that everybody had pinwheels, but this one boy at school would take the pinwheel that others had and then break them. I shouted at him to stop, and he laughed at me like it was obvious he wouldn't vandalize my pinwheel and that I should be flattered. In waking life, this boy existed and he'd pick on people for things like speech impediments—but I guess he'd liked my face, because he'd treat me nicely. I really didn't like that because it obviously wasn't rooted in his being a good person in general. I didn't care if I benefitted compared to the disabled people he picked on; it felt wrong and gross to ever have this attention, and it came out in recurring nightmares, like that with the pinwheels.
I won't Un-Person somebody because of one bad dream, but it's my dreams and feelings that usually tell me when I've put up with too much of a bad thing.
I don't expect people to be telepathic when it comes to my personal boundaries, like "Don't pass on a message from somebody too cowardly to give me a direct and civil talk, because I refuse to hear any problem they have with me from anybody but that specific person who has a problem with me," or "For the third time, I'm not telling you my home address!" Sometimes people want to be peacekeepers or intermediaries and they genuinely think they're helping rather than being manipulated or enabling passive-aggressive cowardice; or they want to know where I live because they want a pen pal for like feeling nostalgic about the mid-1990's when snail mail was still a thing—not because they want to break into my home while I'm sleeping and steal both my kidneys.
I give the benefit of the doubt a lot. Maybe somebody forgot the first two times I said that I'm uncomfortable with divulging where I live, and that I'm uncomfortable with their continuing to pester me about where I live after I already said that I'm uncomfortable.
So, it's not usually one big thing that happened—not like, one time a person paid back a debt they owed me in unrolled cents, or one time they giggled at a cruel and untrue joke that somebody else was saying about me that I overheard…that alone doesn't get me going, "You're dead to me, you are Un-Personed."
Instead, it's usually a pattern of petty yet disproportionate "vengeance" combined with the entitlement to the continued friendship (or even admiration) of the same people they punish for imaginary slights; underhandedness, one-sided transactional approach to relationships, self-centeredness at everybody else's extreme expense, chronic boundary violation, resistance to processing criticism, egotistic deflection, hypocrisy, ultimately detrimental performativity, "dishonesty" that may or may not be a refusal to admit that they can't remember what they actually did to somebody else's detriment for some out-of-proportion vengeance for an imaginary offense—but is still a lack of basic critical thinking and reality checking skills that everybody should have—and other very stressful dynamics to be mired in for any amount of time in our finite mortal lives.
There's always reasons for all that which must make perfect sense to the perpetrators at the time, and to contextualize those behavioral patterns in a specific way—conclusively, people who act in this way probably can't control their behavior and do need therapeutic help or to get into a much better situation that they're in.
Even with that understanding, what I'm usually more inclined to do is cut and run. When it's reached that point that I decide to do this, then it frankly doesn't usually matter if they get better or where it comes from: I won't forgive them, I'm just not the forgiving type. I'll remember how all the misguided layperson's patience and understanding I invested before that point hollowed me out into a husk that used to be a human being with every twisted, careless disappointment they turned it into, how many more times I remember being deceived and used, and the dread will drop in my stomach whenever I hear their voice or see their face for decades after cutting them out of my life, and—exposure therapy, schmexposure therapy—I'm going to remain more inclined to Nope from their interactions.
I've wasted decades of my life on a birth family dynamic that involved all of that and worse, and they never got better—they are awfully self-righteous about not having to be better as people. The toxic demand/expectation for loyalty has ruined what should have been the best years of my life, and could have ruined the rest of my whole life.
Now that I've found people to keep in my life who take scrupulous care to be honest and fair, who won't punish me for voicing my perspective or having needs that they're not central to all the time, who we can respectfully debate with one another and find more growth and insight than unresolvable argument, and who reliably show genuine compassion…Why would I put up with so much less than that basic common decency? Nobody's perfect, but cruel Fates deemed fit to introduce me to several faces of evil, subtle and not so subtle. It's hardly the same as garden-variety basically decent person's imperfections.
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