Sorry for being late, I was crying in a corner.

“Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,

even in the leafless winter, even in the ashy city. I am thinking now of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots trying to leave the ground, I feel my heart pumping hard. I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.” — Mary Oliver, from “Starlings in Winter”, Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays.

Grief. So large, so vast. Where do you even begin with it?

I spent a lot of my time thinking about what I should send for the newsletter and admittedly, in the process of all that thinking, I forgot I even had a newsletter.

Now, the last few weeks of May have been unforgiving. In the shitstorm of schools getting called out for perpetuating violence and my bully reaching out to apologize (because I took his name), I completely lost track of time. And I’ve realized this happens often when I’m supposed to confront anything from my past. Usually, it’s a downward spiral I avoid as much as I can, but inevitably, I fall into it. You can run as fast as you want from your feelings, but they will always catch up.

So, of course, the whole situation had me thinking about what had happened, what really happened to me, and if I remembered anything right (my memory is bad because of repeated traumatic events, but this was also because when my bully “apologized” he said he didn’t do most of the things I accused them of), and eventually I started painting a picture in my head.

As a 16 year old, it’s hard to deal with anything with grace. I can say the same as a 22 year old and will probably say the same in another few years, too. And that’s okay. You always learn to be graceful later, but what matters more is if you’re alright, at the moment. The onus of getting better always lies with the victims — we never point fingers at people because we want to assume they’ve grown as people and are, therefore, absolved of all the trauma they’ve inflicted. It’s pretty shitty. It’s also very easy to tell when someone is apologizing because they don’t want their name dragged through the mud later versus when someone reaches out genuinely, to let you know that they’ve changed.

We find it hard to accept change. If I held up a mirror in front of them, asking them to confront their bad behavior in the past, they wouldn’t. We wouldn’t either, because we get defensive. Which derails….. everything. Usually, you’d expect better apologies, but nothing is ever handed out without the armor of defense. It’s just understood that apologies that come years later are mostly terrible and it’s now your job to clean up the mess. (“I apologized. What more do you want?” “Pay for my therapy, for starters.”)

I can’t sit with my grief. I’ve made peace with it, but it’s very difficult to look past it. To know you deserve better, and to have it taken away from you at such a young age.

As I got older though, I really understood the importance of being nice — not because I didn’t want to hurt anyone — but because I just wanted to be nice. You can tell the difference, right? And it’s also not very hard to do, once you shed off that defensiveness. But I guess we’ll forever be in a loop of “I’m sorry, don’t @ me” and “I did my best, can we move on now?”

You’re not obligated to forgive people, by the way. No ‘ifs’ or ‘buts’. It’s non-negotiable. Some people are shitty and while that’s a fact, some of us don’t forgive.

So deal with it.

Lots of love,

Amulya.