Unkindness…
At some point in our lives, we’ve all experienced unkindness. A harsh comment, a thoughtless action, a betrayal we never saw coming. The kind of experience that leaves you questioning yourself and wondering why someone chose to treat you that way.
The hardest part isn’t always what someone did. It’s what happens afterwards, when their words stay in your head, when you replay the situation, or when you start questioning your own worth and choices.
When we’re hurt, our first instinct is often to fight back. We want to defend ourselves, prove our side, or make the other person feel the same pain they caused us. After all, wouldn’t that feel fair?
Life has taught me that one of our hardest tests isn’t how we treat people who are kind to us. It’s how we respond when someone isn’t.
Last year, I found myself in a situation like this. I was being treated in a way that was deeply unkind, and the experience hurt more than I cared to admit at the time. There were moments when I wanted to say everything I was thinking and make sure the other person understood exactly how much they had hurt me. I was tempted to hold on to the resentment because, in that moment, it felt justified.
Looking back, that experience gave me some of the lessons I needed most: resilience, self-respect, patience, boundaries and, eventually, grace.
Protecting your peace doesn’t mean pretending something didn’t hurt. It means refusing to let someone else’s behaviour decide who you become.
✅ How do you deal with unkindness?
There isn’t one perfect way to respond when someone hurts you. You may need to speak up, set a boundary or walk away. If you ask me, patience is an important part of that process too. Not patience with someone’s bad behaviour, but patience with myself. Giving yourself time to process what happened can make a huge difference in how you choose to respond. Forgiveness might come much later, after you’ve had enough time to understand what happened.
When we’re hurt, we often want to react immediately. We want to defend ourselves, explain our side, correct the story and make sure the other person knows that they were wrong. I’ve been there before. My ego used to push me into arguments because I wanted to prove a point. I wanted to be understood, and I wanted the other person to acknowledge that they were wrong.
Eventually, I realised that not every argument deserves my energy. Not every accusation needs an explanation, and not every person needs access to me. You can know that you were wronged and still choose not to fight.
That doesn’t mean you’re weak. It means you’ve decided that your peace matters more than winning an argument.
Walking away doesn’t erase what happened. It simply means you no longer want to spend your time and energy participating in something that continues to hurt you. Kindness doesn’t require unlimited access to you. Understanding why someone behaves a certain way doesn’t mean excusing what they did.
Those are boundaries, not bitterness.
Sometimes, patience simply means giving yourself enough time before deciding what deserves your response. A few hours, a few days or even a few months can change how you see a situation. When emotions are high, we often want to do something immediately just to feel like we’re taking back control. Waiting until the emotion settles can help you respond from a clearer place instead of reacting from anger.
✅ Healing doesn’t mean forgetting
Can we really forget?
No, I don’t think we really forget.
Some experiences stay with us. We remember the person who betrayed us, the words that hurt us, and the way certain situations made us feel. Healing isn’t about erasing the memory. We live with the memories, but we can choose how we carry them.
There was a time when I thought moving on meant waiting for myself to forget what had happened. I thought that if I still felt angry or sad, then I hadn’t truly healed. Over time, I realised that healing is much more complicated than that.
Remembering something doesn’t mean you have to relive it. Acknowledging that someone hurt you doesn’t mean allowing them to keep hurting you years later. You can recognise the impact an experience had on you without allowing it to define the rest of your life.
When I faced mistreatment from my ex’s mother, I struggled with this. I wanted her to understand how much she had hurt me. I wanted her to feel the same pain I did. More than anything, I wanted some kind of justice.
For a while, resentment became its own kind of attachment. I was still emotionally connected to someone I didn’t even want in my life anymore because I kept revisiting what had happened.
The person who hurt you doesn’t need to be present anymore for you to keep hurting yourself with the memory.
I couldn’t change what happened. I couldn’t make her apologise, and I couldn’t make her understand. What I could change was how much space I continued to give the experience in my life.
That was where my healing began.
Healing became easier when I gave my feelings somewhere to go instead of pretending they weren’t there. I started taking better care of myself, meeting new people, learning new things, writing, travelling and creating new memories. Little by little, the situation became smaller because my life became bigger than it.
Writing has always been one of those places for me. When something is sitting heavily in my mind, I write. Putting my feelings into words helps me understand what I’m actually feeling instead of allowing everything to swirl around in my head. I journal when I need to process something privately, while writing for my blog gives me another outlet when I need to turn complicated feelings into something I can understand.
Books have helped me too. Najwa Zebian’s writing, in particular, has given me words for feelings I couldn’t quite explain myself. Her writing reminds me that the things we experience can hurt deeply without having to define the rest of our lives.
Talking to my mom and closest friends has been another important part of healing. You don’t always need someone to solve your problems. Sometimes you just need someone who can listen without making you feel like you’re carrying everything alone.
Music helps too. There are songs that seem to understand a feeling before you’ve found the words for it. There are days when I listen because I need to cry, and others when I simply need something that makes the heaviness feel a little lighter.
Then, slowly, life starts moving again. You laugh without thinking about why you haven’t laughed in a while. You wake up and realise the heaviness isn’t the first thing on your mind. You start looking forward to things again. Your attention returns to the people, places and experiences that exist outside the hurt.
One day, you realise you went an entire day without thinking about what happened. Then another day passes. Then a week. The memory is still there, but it no longer controls your day.
That is part of healing. Not forgetting what happened, but learning how to live beyond it.
✅ How forgiveness helps us move on
Forgiveness is often misunderstood.
People sometimes think forgiving someone means saying, “It’s okay. I understand. Let’s forget about it and move on.”
I don’t see it that way anymore.
Forgiveness doesn’t erase accountability. It doesn’t cancel the consequences of someone’s actions, and it doesn’t require reconciliation. You can forgive someone and still decide that they no longer belong in your life.
Eventually, I realised that forgiveness was less about what the other person deserved and more about what I was willing to carry. In this case, it was my ex’s mother. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life holding on to anger toward someone who had already taken enough from me.
That wasn’t easy. She never apologised, and for a long time, that mattered to me. I kept wondering how I could forgive someone who had never acknowledged what she had done.
Eventually, I understood that I didn’t need her apology to begin healing. I forgave her not because I thought what happened was acceptable, but because I wanted my emotional life back.
I stopped asking myself why she behaved that way. I stopped imagining the apology I knew I might never receive. I stopped trying to make sense of something that perhaps would never make sense.
Forgiveness gave me permission to stop waiting for something I couldn’t control.
That changed the way I understood forgiveness.
I don’t forgive because I have forgotten. I forgive because I no longer want someone else’s actions to have a permanent place in my emotional life.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean walking back into someone’s life or giving them another opportunity to hurt you. You can forgive someone and still choose distance, boundaries and a life without them in it.
✅ You may never get the closure you want
One of the hardest things about being hurt is accepting that you may never get the apology or explanation you want.
We often imagine that closure will come from the other person. We think we’ll finally feel better when they admit what they did, apologise, explain themselves or when other people finally realise what really happened.
I used to think I needed those things. I’ve experienced situations where the truth eventually came to light, and I’ve experienced situations where I never got the explanation I wanted.
One example that stands out is when my former best friend betrayed me. What started as a misunderstanding became much worse, and instead of apologising, she played the victim and spread false rumours about me. It hurt deeply, and eventually I decided to cut her out of my life.
Years later, some of her friends reached out to apologise. They told me they had eventually seen similar behaviour from her themselves.
At the time, their validation meant something because I had spent so long wondering whether anyone else would ever understand what had happened. It was comforting to know that I hadn’t imagined everything.
Looking back, I realise that the validation wasn’t what healed me. I had already started healing long before those people came back.
Something similar happened after my painful breakup with my ex. Before the relationship ended completely, I wanted closure and tried to reach out, but he ignored me. Six months later, two women he had dated contacted me because they wanted answers about his behaviour. Surprisingly, my ex reached out to me as well, and I finally had the opportunity to say everything I had wanted to say.
I got the closure I had once thought I needed. It felt good, yet it made me question something: had I really needed that closure to move on, or had I simply wanted confirmation that my feelings were valid?
Those conversations helped me understand what happened, yet I had already begun moving forward without them. That experience changed how I see closure.
You can receive an apology and still have healing to do. You can receive an explanation and still feel hurt. You can never receive either and still build a good life afterwards.
People can face the consequences of their actions without you ever knowing about it. You don’t have to spend your life waiting for justice to arrive before you allow yourself to be happy again.
If the truth eventually comes out, let it. If people eventually see what you saw, let them. If someone eventually regrets how they treated you, that’s their journey.
Your job is to take care of your own life.
✅ Don’t let their unkindness become your character
Being hurt by someone can teach you a lot about yourself. It can show you where your boundaries need to be, what you will no longer tolerate and how much emotional energy you have been giving to people who don’t deserve it.
Most importantly, it can teach you that someone else’s behaviour doesn’t have to become part of your character.
If someone is cruel to me, I don’t have to become cruel. If someone lies about me, I don’t have to lie about them. If someone tries to hurt me, I don’t have to spend my life trying to hurt them back.
I’m not saying that’s always easy. I’ve felt anger. I’ve wanted revenge. I’ve imagined what I would say if I ever got the chance. I’ve wished people would finally understand what they had done.
The difficult part is deciding what to do with those feelings.
Eventually, I had to ask myself a different question: “How much more of my life do I want to give to something that has already hurt me once?”
That question changed the way I see forgiveness, boundaries and moving on.
The person who hurt you may have already taken enough. You don’t have to give them your peace too.
There will always be people who disappoint us, misunderstand us, judge us, betray us or treat us in ways we never expected. We can’t control that. What we can control is what we do with the pain afterwards.
We can allow it to make us bitter, or we can allow it to make us wiser. We can spend years waiting for an apology, or we can start rebuilding our lives without one. We can keep asking why someone treated us badly, or we can ask ourselves a better question: “What do I want to become after everything I’ve been through?”
For me, the answer is simple.
I still want to be kind.
Not because everyone deserves my kindness, but because I don’t want someone else’s unkindness to change the person I choose to be.
That doesn’t mean allowing people to hurt me repeatedly. It doesn’t mean staying silent when I need to speak up. It doesn’t mean keeping people in my life simply because I have forgiven them. It means knowing when to protect myself, when to walk away, and when to stop carrying something that no longer belongs in the life I’m trying to build.
Peace doesn’t always come from getting the apology, winning the argument or seeing the truth revealed. Sometimes it comes from reaching a point where you no longer need any of those things to move forward.
You know what happened. You know what you felt. You know what you learned. Most importantly, you know what you will never accept again.
Maybe that’s enough.
Healing isn’t about becoming someone who was never hurt. It’s about becoming someone who can look back at what happened and realise that it no longer has the power to decide who you are.
So, keep your kindness. Keep your boundaries. Keep your self-respect.
When someone treats you badly, don’t let their behaviour convince you that you need to become someone else to survive it.
You can walk away without becoming bitter. You can forgive without forgetting. You can choose peace without pretending that you were never hurt.
May we trust that life has a way of teaching people the lessons they need to learn. We don’t have to deliver the consequences ourselves. We can simply keep moving forward, knowing that how others choose to treat us does not have to change the kind of person we choose to be.
Love,
Auri Duham 🌻
