I think there's a lot of worthwhile stuff to consider there, @Monogram.
I do think there are some folk who are not deserving of second chances. That said, I don't mean that as a universal 'no one should give this person another chance', but simply that I, personally, would not do so, were I in the position of decision-maker.
The way I'm reading, your experience involves not forgiving people more often than doing so; mine is somewhat the opposite, and it comes with more than its fair share of regrets and wince-filled hindsight, too.
I would like to be able to say, "At least I did my best, gave them the benefit of the doubt, and tried my hardest to make things right," is a balm to the times when it goes horribly wrong, but while it helps now and again, it is, in itself, a double-edged sword. There are times it will, yes, be a comfort; you'll know, even if no one else knows -- or would ever believe -- that you did all you could with honest intentions and efforts. There is, absolutely, something to be said for that. Other times, it will cut the shit out of your hands as you try to hang on to that, and you'll hurt, you'll bleed, and you'll start to wonder why the hell you carry that damned sword around at all, let alone by the blade -- but frankly, there's no other way to carry it.
It, like much of life when shit gets real, doesn't come with safety padding.
And even though we're talking about pretendy fun time games, these things rarely come up -- at least for me -- from small things, but from things that are, on some level, a fairly extreme betrayal of an actual friendship, or the realization that the other person is simply incompatible with my fundamental understanding of the universe, the way things work, the way things are, etc. I will pound my head pretty hard against the latter until I'm bruised as hell and dizzy from it, trying to see the other person's perspective if I think they're worth it, but in the end, not everyone is worth that effort, sometimes they actually are just not quite 'right', and sometimes, those people need to be cut loose.
I can, for instance, understand why someone might think, for instance, that because they have a day job/child to raise/business to run/major daily RL responsibility, they should be able to behave IC and OOC with as much selfishness and disregard for their fellow players (even people they claim are close friends) as they can get away with, but that understanding is not going to make me any more willing to deal with them any more than I have to, because I know they have justified, to themselves, that they can do whatever they like, whenever they like, to whoever they like, and whoever objects to this treatment for this reason is in the wrong. And, yes, I have absolutely heard more than a few people say this, out loud, and see nothing at all wrong with it.
You essentially have two options with people like that: continue to be their doormat and tolerate that treatment, or walk away. You don't have to walk away angry, and it's better if you don't (even if that's hard to manage sometimes), but past a certain point, trying to get through/past this sort of thinking is tantamount to impossible.
I'm a loudmouth around here. I'm snarky and generally outspoken as hell and I have enough 'hills to die on' (that I've argued well past their death) that I could probably be mistaken for a brand new roller coaster much of the time. Most folks around here would not peg me for 'stereotypical doormat', but that's absolutely how I've spent the vast majority of my life, even recently.
As someone who typically would reach out to these people -- including the type described above -- when something went wrong, and would try to help/make things better/make things right/etc., often convinced it was my fault (even when it wasn't), I got stepped on more than just 'a lot'.
There is, essentially, a third way: not forgive and forget, not fester in wrath, but just peaceably live and let live, apart.
It is not easy. This is one of those 'do as I say, not as I do' sorts of things; I've almost never managed to do it.
It is almost always the only answer when confronted with some of the more abusive and manipulative personalities out there, in the hobby, and out.
For example, I'm going to describe three people who fall under the description above, with a brief overview of what happened.
#1 Seemed to be a friend. Seemed to be a good friend. Some things about them vibed wrong to me, but that's more or less inevitable with anyone, and I'm sure there's a laundry list of things people could list about me that are the same way. I ignored those things, and unfortunately, in so doing, missed a lot of pattern-based red flags. I ignored the arrogance, the condescension, the lying, the victim complex, etc. until one day, out of the blue, with no change at all in the way we communicated with one another, he began to behave as though I was one of the many people he was convinced were out to get him. To this day, I have no idea why. I just know that the day before, he seemed to understand my meaning and intention perfectly well and we had no significant issues with each other, and the next, everything I said would be contorted into an attack, even if it had to be twisted up like some poor balloon animal to get there.
The downward spiral from there was horrible. There was literally nothing I could say or do that was not taken as an attack. Every choice I made -- on the game or RL -- was somehow focused on him, in his perception. I think it's safe to say that's pretty ridiculous for someone to think, but that was the situation I found myself in. I couldn't log in or out of the game without an extended critique of precisely why I must have done so. I would be told not to speak to the person, then asked a question by them, and if I didn't answer because I'd been told not to speak to him, he'd yell that I was disrespecting him by not answering. If I answered, I would be told I was disrespecting him by talking to him at all. (Meanwhile, if I asked him to leave me alone for a little bit, he simply ignored it. I would get yelled at for not answering him immediately if I was AFK doing my RL job.)
The final analysis I heard from him on all of this was so divorced from reality I literally can't even begin to fathom how he got there, and I still have no idea why any of it happened. I don't need to shower this person in scathing wrath and venom, but I absolutely want nothing to do with them in my life going forward, in or out of character.
#2 Pretended to be someone they absolutely were not, OOC. Actively and aggressively pursued a relationship for roughly six months until I even caved to a hug. It got bigger from there, hitting on a moment of weakness so thoroughly bizarre it would take too long to ever even start to explain -- needless to say, it worked. Cue eight years -- to the day, believe it or not -- of some of the worst head games I've ever experienced.
Then he just never showed up. Vanished. From the kind of life he claimed he was leading, I had genuine cause to believe he was dead. (@WTFE remembers the drama of this dude, I'm sure.) To this day I couldn't tell you if, when he showed up again and came clean about who he actually was, I was so relieved that the person I cared about was actually alive that I somehow managed to overlook the fact that the person I actually cared about was just a construct in the first place.
I tried the empathy route, because the empathy route actually wasn't hard at all; as much as some of us joke about our perpetual awesomeness, I would sincerely doubt there's a single one of us who has never been dissatisfied with themselves and wished they could be someone else, someone they thought was somehow better than they really are. I won't even pretend that doesn't apply to me enormously from time to time, either. While most of us wouldn't make the same choice he did, myself included (I actually have a pathological honesty problem, yes, problem), some of us have. Some of the people I consider among the best of us, most of the time, have made the same choice.
It's because we all do fuck up sometimes. Sometimes we're selfish. Sometimes we're weak. Sometimes we're stubborn or pig-headed (hi) or blind to our own behavior and even if we were thoroughly adept at self-examination -- which few people are -- we saw no reason to apply it at that one critical time, to that one critical choice. We all fuck up. It is important to remember that.
One of the key aspects of healing this kind of break when it occurs is realizing the mistake, and internalizing that lesson. The people who have made the same fuckup around here? There are plenty I still consider to be among the best of us, and people I would not hesitate to count as friends -- even good friends -- and go to bat for, help with whatever I could on game or off. The difference is, they realized: this did more harm in the long run than the temporary gains it won me, including real harm to myself.
This guy didn't. Years into this disaster, someone came to me from out of nowhere. Someone who was being lied to, just as I was. Another false identity seemingly designed to appeal just to that other person, another years-long target of mind games and emotional manipulation. I was shocked. With all he and I had been through, I genuinely thought nothing could shake me. He'd 'cheated' plenty of times, accused me of the same even though I never had (I can be loyal long past any rational degree of reasonable sense in regard to the people I care about), and so on. None of that broke me like this did. Nothing, frankly, could compare to having to look 'me, the girl afraid the person she cared about was dead' in the eyes, and tell them: it isn't the first time he's done this.
And I felt responsible. Even now, I feel responsible. I wonder if the empathy and forgiveness somehow allowed him to think what he did was OK on some level -- which is, I know, far more responsibility than I should take on myself here, when he's the one actively pursuing the awful behaviors. I still do it. I remember what it felt like to be that 'me', and I would not wish that feeling on the person I hate most in the world.
When last we spoke of it, he claimed he had felt bad lying to me, but not the other person, and that he'd done the same to others before he met either of us for several years and felt no guilt for what he'd done to them, either. This did not make me feel special. It only made me feel more guilty. It didn't, somehow, make what he did all right. It only confirmed he could not ever, ever be trusted, even if I was this magic special person who he felt bad for lying to. (And let's be real here, what are the odds of that? Oldest trick in the book: "But you're different!")
So empathy, understanding, and even the best-intentioned attempts to forgive... they can backfire. I don't say this to discourage anyone from making the attempt. I say this because that? That was hell. I say this because I don't want to see anyone else go through that.
I ran into this person on Shang, and he's the reason I don't play there, now. When I went to TR, he followed. He came to BITN, too. All of the stalky/controlling behaviors he had become accustomed to getting away with on Shang were fairly glaring to folks around me on TR and on BITN. Things he thought he could explain away, or that there was nothing wrong with, everyone around me could see: this is not all right, surr, please let us do something to get rid of him.
And really? I owe them an apology for not letting them, because I was afraid of the torrent of abusive crap I'd get from him if anyone reacted at all, or even somehow let on that they knew there was a problem. That's the level of 'terrified doormat' we're talking about, and that was just, what... 5-6 months ago, tops?
#3 ...is complicated. While the previous situations are over and done with and I have no reason to engage with those people again (thankfully), this one is ongoing. There have been lies. There has been a lot of damaged trust, a lot of frustratingly and needlessly shady nonsense. Thing is, one hell of a lot built that trust in the first place -- and that, ultimately, counts for more. This person was there through it all with #1, and for about half of #2, and is, I can say without overstating the matter in the slightest, is why I am still here at all and not ashes mixed into the dust in a suburban Delaware side yard and the sand and pebbles on a beach in Cape May. (This is not an easy thing to admit, but it is true.)
Even so, #3, when called on shit, does not evade. #3 owns their shit. Admits it. Actively works toward means of making it right, which is not always easy, even when it is not easy.
It's probably easy to see why #3 will get every shred of effort I can manage to work toward a positive 'forward', just as surely evident why #1 and #2 no longer have a place in my life, and are no longer welcome in it, whether they're forgiven or not.
Ultimately (and unfortunately), for many of us, shit will go wrong with the people who do matter that we've met through this hobby. Having been involved for twenty years now, I count myself lucky to have had only three of these that have gone into the deep waters. The ones I actively bitch about? The Jeurgs and the Rexes and the Spiders? Relatively speaking, even with the thousands of dollars in damage Spider did to my actual RL house, they're footnotes, by comparison.
As for the people who don't mean much, they're fairly easy to make a fair call about -- just figure out how much you're willing to trust them and with what, overlook the rest as best as you can, and keep going.
Sometimes, empathy won't work. Sometimes, forgiveness will be taken as permission. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is walk away, and do your best to forget. Scream if you have to. Vent if you have to. Get the cringe out, or the rant, or whatever else -- but keep going, even when that damned sword feels like it's going to cut your fingers off sooner or later and you're gonna fall a long way, and hard.
As much as this community can be a petty collection of bitchy whiners and grudgewank rantophiles, I will honestly -- and with no small measure of thanks -- say it has helped. The folk with less than wholesome intent, like examples #1 and #2, will do their damndest to isolate you, because it gives them more control. While I have not really mentioned them here much -- and if so, have made a point of doing so without names and somewhat obliquely -- especially compared to some others, the simple fact that there is a place where people can share their gripes, happy moments, goals, and concerns in the most general of ways is an enormous help.
While we can get petty and demanding and bitchy, it's still a baseline that's grounded in more than one control freak's perspective. Never underestimate that shit; it's actually priceless.
So while it's laudable to look at ways you can increase your empathy, accept apologies, offer forgiveness, apologize yourself for your own mistakes or choices you've made that have done someone harm (intentional or otherwise), repair damaged connections, or otherwise work toward all of those best-intentioned ends, please do make sure to take the time to learn from and then forgive yourself for your anger, your pettiness, your bitchy moments, your mistakes. Learn from them first, and accept and internalize that they were/are mistakes, but do it. (I could go into reasons why from 'guilt makes us do stupid shit/tolerate what we never should as a perceived penance' to 'nobody actually wants to read blurt like this and it's best to not let it get to that point in the first place', but I don't think I need to at this point, right?)
