The Unpardonable Sin

Which sounds more reasonable? To receive an apology and then forgive, or to simply forgive, knowing that no apology is necessary?

Obviously the first one is the one that makes the most sense. But it seems somewhat paradoxical, especially since we live in a society that constantly states "Everyone makes mistakes" and "I'm only human" and "nobody's perfect."

So if nobody's perfect, why do we demand perfection all the time and get extremely pissed when we don't get it?

A couple days ago, I had a meeting with a fairly important woman in the entertainment industry. The meeting went well, and she asked me to send her a follow up e-mail later that night. I did, and upon sending the e-mail, I realized that I had misspelled her name--I was off by one letter. I about went into a fit. I sent an extremely apologetic e-mail to her immediately afterwards. But for some reason, even that wasn't enough. I felt like I needed to sit there and punish myself, thinking:

"God, you are so fucking stupid. How could you mess up like that? You know she's going to read that first e-mail and be like, 'Well, obviously this guy doesn't respect me enough to spell my name correctly, so to hell with him.' I worked myself into such a state of panic that tears were on the verge of pouring out of my eyes. And yet, as all this was happening, there was a part of my mind that just thought the whole thing was hysterically funny, and it was just sitting back and watching me in utter disbelief. I called a good friend of mine and told her the whole story, and of course, she said I was behaving ridiculously. "Let it go," she said. "Just let it go, it's not a big deal." But I couldn't let it go. I felt like if I let it go, something worse would happen, and the only way to save myself from THAT was to feel the guilt and the wrongness of it all now.

Of course, the real issue had nothing to do with this woman or my career; it had to do with myself and why I felt the need to be this perfect individual, so much that self-inflicted mental anguish was the only price to be paid for failing.

The next morning, the woman happily wrote me back, totally ignoring my faux pas, saying that when she returned to LA, she would be sending me some materials. I had two reactions. The first was relief that she wasn't angry. But the second was a feeling of discontent. I felt like I need forgiveness. I needed her to actually say, "I recognize that you made an error, but I forgive you. All is well." And I think I needed her to say that because I, in fact, didn't have the courage to let myself off the hook, which affirms by ever-growing belief that though we sometimes cannot always control the circumstances around us, we can always choose how we respond to them.

It has been about half a year since I've hung out with one of my best friends. Without going too deeply into it, we had a falling out over business-related issues, which in turn affected our friendship. I've had dreams about her, but in the dreams, everything is okay and we sorta laugh off all the things that happened between us. Every dream has been like this. The guilt is gone, the need for forgiveness is gone--we're friends again. But when I wake up, I still feel an ache and a sense of loss over the whole thing. So which is it? Is forgiveness needed? Or is everything okay again, and we just choose not to see that this is so?