Give-up Capacity

For noble and very understandable reasons, we've come to associate maturity and kindness with a capacity not to give up on people. But this broad and generous truth can be in danger of missing out on an important caveat that health and maturity may also require, at points, a subtle capacity to give up on one or two people, not always and indefinitely to keep giving them the benefit of the doubt, not invariably to forgive them one more time, not relentlessly to imagine the nice things they might really really have meant beneath the thoughtless and unkind things they actually did and said. We might need occasionally to despair of someone as the price to pay for keeping faith with ourselves. We need to hear that surprisingly, some people aren't entirely good and we aren't necessarily the problem. We need to learn to blame and get annoyed with someone other than ourselves. We need to do something very strange: walk away. This is no sign of cowardice or weakness of character. It's a sign that we have (finally) learnt to love ourselves and so place our needs where these should always have been: at the center of our considerations.