Your Own Personal Severus (Snape, that is ...)

I'm having a bit of a difficult time at the moment, because I'm having the experience of someone thinking that I did the absolutely, completely wrong thing and, frankly, really loathing me for it.

Part of me is okay with this, because a) this person loathes me nearly all of the time (think Harry Potter and his relationship to Snape) and b) I am 95% sure that I did not do the wrong thing. In fact, I was very careful to check in and ask questions and make sure that I was doing the right thing because I really wanted to avoid this whole situation. (Clearly, I have failed.)

Also, the person who most matters here seems to believe that I didn't do anything wrong, which is important.

The other 5% of my brain, however, is going completely nuts, wondering if I should have done something better, or differently, or stepped back and let other people take over. I could have. It would have been simple, and then there would be no discord or unhappiness, I don't think.

Well, actually, I might have been made slightly unhappy. But I could have lived with it.

The problem with this -- with anything like this, I think -- is that, as time travel is not widely available at this juncture, it's not like I can go back and change or fix the situation. This is how life is: we muck it up. We do things and other people get angry. We laugh and we cry and we fall down (some of us more often than others) and we stand up and we do things. Some of them are good. Some of them are not. We're imperfectly human and we do imperfect things. Sometimes they're well intended. Sometimes, they're not.

And sometimes, we can't get out of our own way long enough to see the difference. I've spent a lot of time sitting with this particular mess, and I think -- no, I know -- that the role I played in this most recent messy drama was not the one that my personal Snape thinks I played.  I also realize that she does not believe it, and that there's a solid chance that she never will.

So I have to learn to be okay with that.

Because unlike time travel, love is widely available, isn't it? And since we can't use time travel to go back and change things, maybe we have to use love to move forward and change them in the now and in the future, so that what is currently a bunged up mess can become something better. So that while you move forward, you do it with the certainty that you're still doing the best you can because you're allowing your actions to be dictated by love and not spite or anger. You put your grudges down because they're a burden, and because carrying them means that your hands are too full to reach out to other people, which is all we can really do, isn't it? Reach out.

Even Snape did it at the end.