By: Grecia Espinoza

At the start of June, I was freshly 25 and at the end of my first teaching contract. In front of me was a long and leisurely summer of stillness that terrified my adult mind. The stillness I experienced this summer came with a prevailing existential dread that propelled me to turn and turn problems around in my mind until they turned stale like old bubble gum.

This internal turmoil was exacerbated by the fact that I was living—am living, and perhaps will always live—in a heightened political climate. The gash which once split the north and the south during the Civil War never healed, and we watch a new stitch come undone with each abuse of power. Now I understand that there are actually three Americas: one that wants to go back, one that wants to go forward, and one that doesn't care to move at all.

My generation, who sported Blackberry phones in the back pocket of our Aeropostale jeans, is terrified of social stagnancy and repulsed by the idea of reversion. Although most of us don’t particularly understand what steps we need to take toward the life that we want, we still relentlessly defend our pursuits.

This fear of reversion and complacency has also given birth to a social phenomenon known as “cancel culture.” The term was originally coined by conservatives to describe a kind of mob mentality that seemed prevalent among liberals who held progressive ideas for the future of America.

Many voices, mostly conservative pundits and public figures who are most susceptible to cancel culture, have attempted to ‘cancel’ the movement for its public shaming and ostracization of people whose ideas go against the progressive political agendas.

The way I see it, cancel culture gets us thinking about political activism (even if it is not political activism itself), and that is closer to change than not having awareness at all. In many ways, cancel culture serves as a social contract that holds us accountable and forces us to mindfully consider the ways in which our existence impacts the experience of others.

Ultimately, for culture to change, it’s imperative that society feels pressured to act accordingly. This is particularly true for political figures who we expect to stand as experts in their field, and for public figures who have access to heavily influential platforms.

It’s easy for a culture to cancel public figures whose complexities, inner lives, and personal histories are unfamiliar to us. These people have been placed on public platforms that come with responsibilities which they now must step up to. The problem is that we’ve adopted the ideas of cancel culture and applied them to our personal lives where it simply doesn’t belong.

It’s indisputable that we’re living in an unforgiving culture, but how does our tendency to condemn affect our ability to accept people in their humanity, which is multifaceted, complex, and often erroneous and unsophisticated?

These were the questions that plagued me in the month of June. I had been afflicted with an unshakeable sense of guilt that stuck to me like satin on a hot summer night. I had been relentless in my relationships and only noticed my tendency to crucify people when I myself was crucified.

Forgiveness is something we all struggle with, and it’s actually harder to forgive the younger you are. Most of us aren’t comfortable with forgiving until we’ve reached late adulthood. In a study on forgiveness, researcher Robert Enright found most of the children in the study refused to extend forgiveness unless their violator had been punished, or if they knew they would receive compensation. As we grow older, we begin to understand forgiveness as a moral virtue and a skill that allows us to live more fulfilling lives.

Despite the fact that we’ve been conditioned to extend forgiveness from a very early age, it’s not something that comes naturally to the human mind. It’s a skill that we have to actively practice. This is why forgiveness is easier for older, more experienced, and wiser minds.

In the early half of my twenties, I didn’t ruminate on the concept of forgiveness, because I didn’t understand the value of it. And truthfully, it was easier to simply “cut people off.” I was disposing of people for being human. In my naivety, it seemed the right course of action. Coming of age during the height of cancel culture didn’t help my case.

Everyone around me was simply getting rid of people who “disturbed their peace” in any way, and I saw nothing wrong in doing the same. What escaped me, at the time, was that holding people responsible for my inner peace was an oxymoron. It prevented me from forming strong relationships in which neither party felt as though they were walking on eggshells. But the culture taught me that the healthy way to handle this was to dispose of people who didn’t behave how I wanted them to.

I quickly found that cultivating peace in my life by alienating myself wasn’t helping me grow, it was making me avoidant. In fact, the real personal developments happened in the moments in which my peace was severely disturbed, and I had to learn how to gracefully move through these disturbances.

Somehow, I have managed to retain a handful of friendships over the years, but many of my familial and romantic relationships were, some still are, in the gutter. Truthfully, I was obsessed with the prospect of progress. I desperately wanted to lead a happy life, and it seemed that alienating oneself was the solution my generation was recommending.

I think my parents felt my indifference the most. In fact, I’m not sure that my relationship with my parents will ever recover from the years of separation I placed between them and me. I was selfish and blinded by my own suffering that I was unable to extend empathy to my parents who were doing their best with what they had and what they knew.

My mother was ill-fated from birth, chosen by some powerful force to endure a life of unfortunate events. My father’s life, equally complicated, was limited by the restraints of machismo. These were major character-building details that I overlooked because I was too focused on my own distress.

Despite their misdirected rage and unintentional neglect, they loved me in the best way they knew how to, but I lacked the wisdom and the empathy to see them in their complexity. I fixated on their negative qualities, rather than choosing to understand their unconventional displays of love.

This summer of reflection helped me realize that despite my generation’s progressive ideas, advocacy for self-care, and political tolerance, we are all collectively working against our own beliefs by minimizing the importance of forgiveness.

Perhaps, in the process of rewriting politics and correcting cultural problems we’ve unknowingly created new ones. We live in a culture that aches to feel understood but refuses to understand. I have found this to be particularly true amongst my generation of progressives who have taken the relentless nature of new-age wisdom at face value.

The attainment of happiness and peace in our life does not necessitate alienation and should not lead us to a place of loneliness and division. It’s imperative that we see other humans in their wholeness rather than defining them by their worst qualities. It does not escape me that there exist unforgivable offenses where justice triumphs over forgiveness; in these complicated situations, forgiving doesn’t have to mean mending a relationship, sometimes forgiving is a personal journey in which we release the anger associated with particular harm. It’s simply teaching your heart to trust, love, and connect, despite the possibility of being wrong.

Most of the people in our lives are doing their best to love us with the tools that life has given them. After all, the most progressive action we can take as a generation is to seek to understand rather than seek to condemn. Inner peace is found by learning to manage our discomfort rather than avoiding it, by learning to transform resentment into empathy so that we may learn to understand and accept the way our politics proclaim to do. □

About the Writer

Grecia Espinoza is a graduate student at New York University where she is working towards a master’s in Comparative Literature. Besides writing for H3R, she teaches 9th grade Language Arts and writes for an immigration law firm in Orlando Florida. She is currently working on a collection of poems on the subject of grief and loss that will be completed at the end of this year. Her writing typically mediates on subjects related to art and self-recognition as modes through which one can find purpose and enjoyment in our life. She is particularly interested in subjects like contemporary literature, interior design/architecture, fashion, and wellness.

Article Credits

Grecia’s Email: grecia.espinoza@outlook.com

Grecia’s Instagram: @6rrace