No one walks around campus without being burned by someone or without accumulating any opposition (short for “opposition”). People will hurt you – that’s the simple truth, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. What you can do, however, is decide how you deal with the injury – cliché, I realize, but hear me out.

Whenever someone hurts me, my go-to strategy is to avoid them at all costs, even if that means I have to do a very drastic U-turn to avoid eye contact. Unfortunately, when it’s a small campus like USC, it’s impossible to avoid people forever, let alone for a week.

While I naively believed that distance and space would help me recover, in reality I was just avoiding my feelings, not dealing with them. It wasn’t until I felt like hitting a wall at the idea of ​​my ex-roommate coming to my friend’s festival celebration last week that I realized I wasn’t as overcome with the trauma and hurt than I thought.

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I was still consumed by anger, bitterness and this deep desire for revenge against a person who could no longer do anything to me. I felt so overwhelmed by hatred that, honestly, I didn’t recognize myself. I couldn’t believe I was letting the mere idea of ​​breathing the same air as her destroy my entire world and ruin the experiences I was looking forward to, but yet I did it.

Even though I knew I shouldn’t feel this way about her or anyone, I was blinded by rage and spent hours bawling my eyes out to no avail. I ruined my evening, my parents’ evening, and my friends’ classes – I ruined something for everyone except her. Really, who was this anger hurting?

Unless I’m planning on channeling that anger into a Grammy-winning song or going absolutely crazy in the middle of the Tutor Campus Center, the answer to that question is just plain old me.

This moment made me realize that the bitterness had to end – not for the opponents but for me. People will always hurt you, especially in college when you meet various people. If I wasted time holding grudges against every person who hurts me, I wouldn’t even have time to write this article.

Yet I must add a disclaimer: even now, I struggle to forgive. After all, it’s difficult to forgive people who don’t believe they’ve done anything to be forgiven or even ask for forgiveness.

But the more I think about it, the more I realize that these are the people it’s most important to forgive because they’re the ones who aren’t worth it. They shouldn’t mean anything to you, and if they really don’t mean anything, stop spending your time and energy thinking about them. Any emotion towards them – love, anger or hatred – is useless.

Every time I seethe with rage, I try to remind myself that maybe they weren’t bad people – just sad people who hurt me to feel good about themselves. Maybe hurting me wasn’t even intentional, and I was just collateral damage during a bad phase in their lives.

I don’t make excuses for people’s hurtful actions towards me. They certainly should have thought about their actions. However, that doesn’t necessarily make them horrible people, and I shouldn’t wish them harm. They are humans too and they make mistakes, even if they don’t realize it yet.

Most of the time thinking this way helps, but I admit that other days I just want to scream until my voice goes hoarse. So when I’m not in the mood to be so nice and give them the benefit of the doubt, I try journaling, playing the ukulele, or even squashing ping pong balls (imagining that it’s their face instead of the ball) – anything that helps me let out my emotions.

Forgiveness is a gradual process and if you make an honest effort, which only you can determine, you may one day achieve it.

Edhita Singhal is a young student who writes about the life lessons she learned at university in her column “Thinking Out Loud,” which appears every other Wednesday.