No one saunters around campus having been burned by none or accumulating zero opps (short for “opposition”). People will hurt you — that’s the simple truth, and you can do absolutely nothing about it. What you can do, though, is decide how you deal with the hurt — cliche, I am well aware, but hear me out. 

Whenever someone hurts me, my go-to strategy is to avoid them at all costs, even if it means I have to take a very dramatic U-turn to avoid eye contact. Unfortunately, when it comes to a small campus like USC, avoiding people forever, let alone a week, is impossible. 

While I naively used to believe that distance and space would help me recover, in reality, I was just avoiding my feelings, not dealing with them. Only when I found myself wanting to punch a wall at the prospect of my ex-roommate coming to my friend’s festival celebration last week did I realize that I wasn’t quite as over the trauma and hurt as I thought I was.

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I was still so consumed with anger, bitterness and this deep-seated desire for vengeance for a person who can do nothing to me now. I felt so overwhelmed with hatred that I honestly didn’t recognize myself. I couldn’t believe that I was letting the mere idea of breathing the same air as her bring my entire world down and ruin experiences that I looked forward to, but yet I did. 

Despite knowing that I shouldn’t feel this way about her or anyone, I was blinded by rage and spent hours bawling my eyes out to no avail. I ruined my evening, my parents’ night and my friends’ classes — I ruined something for everyone but her. Truly, who was this anger hurting?

Unless I planned on channeling this anger into a Grammy-winning song or going batshit crazy on her smack dab in the middle of Tutor Campus Center, the answer to that question is just little, old me. 

This moment made me realize that the bitterness had to end — not for the opps but for me. People will always hurt you, especially in college when you come across a variety of people. If I wasted time holding grudges against every person who does me wrong, I wouldn’t even have the time to write this article. 

Yet, I must add a disclaimer: Even now, I am struggling to forgive. After all, it’s hard to forgive people who don’t believe they have done anything to be forgiven for or even ask for forgiveness. 

But, the more I think about it, the more I realize that those are the people who are most important to forgive because they are the ones who are not worth it. They should mean nothing to you, and if they truly mean nothing, stop spending your time and energy thinking about them. Any emotion toward them — love, anger or hate — is all unnecessary.

Whenever I find myself seething with rage, I try to remind myself that perhaps they weren’t bad people — just sad people who hurt me to feel good about themselves. Perhaps, hurting me wasn’t even intentional, and I was just collateral damage during a bad phase of their life. 

I am not making excuses for people’s hurtful actions toward me. They definitely should have thought their actions through. However, that doesn’t necessarily make them awful people, and I shouldn’t wish ill on them. They are humans, too, and they make some mistakes, even if they don’t realize it just yet. 

On most days, thinking this way helps, but I will admit that on other days, I just want to scream until my voice goes hoarse. So, when I am not in the mood to be so nice and give them the benefit of the doubt, I try to journal, play the ukulele or even smash some ping pong balls (imagining it’s their face instead of the ball) — anything that helps me let out my emotions. 

Forgiveness is a gradual process and if you are making an honest effort, which is something only you can determine, you will be able to achieve it one day.

Edhita Singhal is a junior writing about life lessons she has learned in college in her column, “Thinking Out Loud,” which runs every other Wednesday.