There’s a strange temptation we all feel when someone who treated us poorly suddenly comes back into our lives. Is karma finally coming back around? Is this the cosmos giving us the chance to break even?
It’s tempting and gratifying to imagine this chance to set the record straight. The kind of thing that you fantasize about in the shower when you’re having arguments in your head, that moment where you get the chance to establish your worth and finally get that validation that you never received.
At this point, though, it’s important to realize that seldom in life are people ever going to recognize that they were wrong. That they treated you wrong. These things might come if they discover self-reflection.
With certainty, that realization is never going to come from an argument, let alone one where they were left burned and without a response. If anything, they’ll just get their ego up and convince themselves that they were “right about you” or whatever else they need to tell themselves to be able to sleep at night.
It’s sometimes incredibly hard to stomach, but it is almost always better not to burn bridges behind you. What purpose does it serve to go scorched earth and leave a wake of bad feelings and enemies behind you, when you could instead be measured and collected?
One deep breath, a swallow of pride, and you’ll find it’s easy enough to shake that monster of pride off your back and get on with your life.
In the professional setting, especially, in time, these people could become references or word-of-mouth supporters as they, too, let old disagreements fall away and look upon your relationship with rose-tinted glasses.
This is how this employee, a service worker, approached the situation when their former boss, from a job they had been let go from back in July, reached out to them to see if they would be willing to return to their former role. A boom in trade over the holidays had meant that they had found themselves short-staffed.
Certainly, the opportunity was here for the employee to “get theirs” and put their ex-employer in their place, but they chose instead to figure out how they could respond professionally, seeking to carve out a response that refrained from being spiteful while still politely declining their former boss’s request. While they were happy with the new job that they had found in the meantime, this ensured that there were no hard feelings and would give them options down the road.
