It's human nature to screw up. We all make mistakes and we all hurt one another. No one can maintain a perfect relationship because perfect relationships don't exist. You won't find a friend who you won't fight with. You won't find a girlfriend or boyfriend who does everything perfectly. Your family members will get on your nerves, but you will move on. It's a fundamental reality of life that people screw up. The hardest part is not accepting that reality, it's learning to forgive the mistakes made by the ones closest to you.

It's a strange thing, feeling betrayed. You go threw a rollercoaster of emotions and it will feel like your whole world has come crumbling down. The reason that any sort of hurt or betrayal comes as such a shock to our system is because of the way we live our lives. We are absorbed in a bubble. Wondering around from day to day, doing the things we deem necessary to our success. We tell ourselves that we're doing right to the people we love and we crave the thought that they're doing right by us. But our needs and wants eventually clash with the needs and wants of others. And because it's in our nature to mess up occasionally, we hurt one another.

Pop your bubble and you make yourself less vulnerable to being hurt by others. Realize that people do wrong. Realize that doing wrong doesn't make you a bad person on the inside. Once you accept that your life is not a utopia of perfect people, you open yourself up to the power of forgiveness. Attempting to forgive with a closed mind is like trying to run on water. In order to forgive someone, you have to open your mind to the reality that they are still a good person. I have faith in the goodness in humanity. I believe that there is good and bad in everyone, and the good overwhelmingly outweighs the bad.

People mess up. We fight, we yell, we curse, we cry, we ache, and we heal. Forgiveness is one of the strongest tools we have to turn hate into love. The first step to forgiving is accepting that people are good at heart, despite the mistakes they make.