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Confrontation and Hope

Over the past year, I’ve been reflecting a lot and trying to constantly improve myself and the way I act around others. Oftentimes, it’s easy to say something you don’t mean and is of little significance to you, but it may end up hurting someone else inadvertently. This also happens the other way around, and regardless of how it happens, it’s important to reach out to the other person and make yourself heard.

Confrontation

Confrontation is how I refer to the act of bringing up any frustration or negative feelings you may have for another person, due to their behavior or perhaps something they said. It’s something that is vitally important, as more often that not, the other person may not even be aware that they ended up hurting you. I personally find it really tricky to do, as you never want to come off as if you’re attacking them, but at the same time you want to be able to present your point of view clearly without downplaying it.

In recent times, I’ve been on both sides of this. There are times where I’ve acted poorly towards a friend of mine, and there are times where I’ve felt hurt and have reached out to the other person to express my feelings. In both cases, these were some really tricky conversations, where both parties need to be open and honest with each other in order to successfully acknowledge and resolve the issue at hand. It’s a tricky balance - you want to be able to express your point of view, but at the same time accept that the other person also has a unique perspective that they want to communicate. In no regard am I an expert in this; in fact it’s something I’m constantly trying to get better at and I learn something new every time such a situation arises. However, in all my experience to date, there’s been one key feeling I’ve had after every conversation - hope.

Hope

Hope is definitely a weird emotion to feel after having a tough conversation; you may feel disappointed in yourself, angry, frustrated, etc. but hope? However, I think it’s likely the most important takeaway from and confrontation. I’ll explain the reason by explaining what I exactly mean by hope. There are two types I have in my mind:

To start, when I say hope for your future, I mean the hope that arises when you start to consider “future you”. Every difficult conversation is a new avenue for learning. Every time someone brings up something that perhaps rubbed them the wrong way and you truly accept it, the better the future version of you has the potential to be. With every new perspective you encounter, the more opportunities you have to learn and better your handling of any given situation. This can only be a positive - even if you reject the other person’s remarks for one reason or another, the fact that you truly considered it means you are that much more aware of your words next time. “Future you” is that much more considerate and aware of their impact on those around them, which is a definite source of hope for the future, at least for me.

Furthermore, every time such a conversation arises, the more hope I feel for society in general. Regardless of which side initiated the confrontation, both sides stand to benefit and learn from the situation at hand; the learning is then sort of propagated throughout society as a whole. Even if one other person is aware of something that perhaps can hurt someone, they have the potential to share this notion with another, and another after them, and so on so forth. While this may be naive, it’s something I always keep in mind - even if I’m wrong about this assumption, there is no downside. Even if no one else learns from it, what matters is that someone listened to your perspective and acknowledged it - that alone is something to always be hopeful for.

Remarks

Note that with every possible confrontation, there is a time and a place. Some people may not take feedback nearly as well as others, and it’s something to keep in mind. However, with every successful confrontation comes hope - and that hope is what helps drive my future growth and the growth of society in general. It’s important to know that every confrontation will not be successful - but even those where you may feel trampled on or frustrated, it’s yet another avenue for you to learn to explain yourself better or perhaps learn something about the way to approach future confrontations.

I guess it boils down to the fact that with every experience, however small, comes the potential to learn. Learning is something that is quintessential to my life, as it means I always have something to look forward to, something to be hopeful for.