Contexts do change...
Recently, I am experiencing a strange (to me) response/lack of towards someone who said and did something(s) I would have once considered flat out unforgivable and in need of retribution of some sort---
Years ago, two days after my brother killed himself, I went into work (already a hostile environment since the administrator had, I learned later, essentially instructed people to do all they could to be rid of me for personal reasons related to a friend of hers---long odd story but I received phone calls from people there I did not know personally once I left, telling me the story, with apologies...)oddly, I worked again for the same "people" without incident later---as a consultant/contracted nurse.
Anyway, this woman (who was, at the time, all too eager to please the boss) came up to me as I entered the building and said "Oh we were going to write you up today but I guess it isn't a good day." smiling------------(this is in a psych hospital setting by the way)-----
Luckily, I was still numb and didn't respond. (except to leave my keys in the office a few weeks later with a simple "I quit effective immediately" note)
Now, fifteen years later, this woman is, in another setting, a coworker...even a "supervisor"...and acting like a long lost friend....oddly, as the months drift by, I don't find myself astonished, or even angry when she comes and sits next to me, chats and clearly wants me to like her (she is not the most liked person around there at all)----I realize, with an odd distance, that she is troubled, more so than me, and that she will never come after me again, in fact will defend me always now....and where I at first thought I should share my past experience with our mutual boss as an fyi, I no longer feel that way at all.
She is just there, and I let her be as she is...my anger is so long gone...forgetting is not possible, nor should it be, it is not even forgiveness, it is a kind of letting go and putting aside.....................................
and, perhaps a recognition that this is one basically troubled, unhappy woman who is getting old and trying to mellow her self, and who may even be a bit afraid of what I might say or do...