What Will & Aunt Viv Teach Us About Forgiveness & Owning Our Mistakes
Our Fav 90s Family is Back with Lessons for Our Own Families
If you’ve never debated whether light-skinned or dark-skinned Aunt Viv was the better Aunt Viv, then you didn’t go to public school in the 90s. This meaningless debate (and even more meaningless complexion descriptors) came up at least once in our lives in either a random homeroom period or while we were doing absolutely nothing in that “cool” teacher’s class (cuz damn our education!).
Back then I had absolutely no idea that there was a larger battle going on behind the scenes with Will and Janet Hubert. As I grew older and began to learn of the feud however, I instinctively took Will’s side and dismissed the issue as Janet being a difficult person. But watching the entire family back together again on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’s reunion recently changed my perspective entirely.
I love Will, and I say this next statement with love, but watching it made me realize that basically — Will was on some little boy shit back then. (A blunt, but accurate description). And I think he owns up to that during his discussions with Janet and the cast during the reunion.
The kicker is, however, that this doesn’t make him a bad person. There are time periods in life where we just don’t know any better, and our behavior reflects that. In so many ways, even though Will was technically a grown man at the time, he was still a little boy — doing little boy things.
In his Red Table Talk Takeover with Dr. Ramani Durvasula, he discussed this very issue and shared the experience of realizing that, back then, his inner child was perceiving Janet as a threat because his natural ability to charm and win people over hadn’t, from his perspective, worked on her.
Seeing them put aside their beef after almost 30 years really made me think about the importance of forgiveness. And equally important, it made me think about the need for us to be able to own up to our mistakes. In many ways, I view them as two sides to the same coin.
When We Can Own Up to Our Own Mistakes, Forgiving Others is Easier
Sometimes forgiveness feels so hard for us because we walk around with an idealized version of ourselves in our head. We think we’re better people than we are. (Yes you! — And me too — All of us.) I’m not saying we aren’t good people, but good people are allowed to be wrong too. We’re allowed to make mistakes.
Often because we don’t give ourselves the room to believe those notions can co-exist, we shut off the part of our brain that would otherwise look critically at our own actions. We wrap ourselves up in the protective bubble of feeling like we’re a “good person” so we don’t feel the need to check ourselves. That outlook makes owning up to your own mistakes more difficult.
We get so shocked and offended by other people’s behaviors as if we’ve never wronged anyone ourselves. We walk around with an air of “I would never and could never!” But in reality we have and we did, just in different ways. (Let she who has never hurt someone cast the first stone!)
In our stories, we are always the heroes. In these stories, our sins are not so bad. Our wrongs are unquestionably forgivable. For us.
But as the saying goes, in someone else’s story, we may be the villains. For them, our sins may be the worst kind of bad. Our wrongs may feel unforgivable. This very scenario of competing narratives played out for Will and Janet for nearly three decades.
I’ve always loved Will’s energy, so I was glad to see him make amends with Janet. I was also glad to see him own up to the ways in which his actions hurt her in the past. I felt like that was grown man behavior. Kudos to him.
And that’s such a difficult thing to do — for any of us. Who wants to admit that they’re wrong? Who wants to be seen as the “bad guy”? But I think part of being the “good people” that we like to claim we are requires us to right our wrongs when we can.
When we remember that being a “good person” doesn’t make us incapable of being wrong, we can free ourselves up to apologize and take ownership of things we’ve done rather than trying to downplay them.
When we see ourselves as flawed individuals capable of hurting others, we understand that others are also flawed and capable of hurting us. When we can give ourselves grace for our wrongs and shortcomings, we can give others grace for their wrongs and shortcomings. When we can forgive ourselves, we can forgive others.
But if we’re walking around acting as if we can do no wrong, we never get to this point in the process.
If They Knew Better, They Would Have Done Better
At 21 years old, Will thought that what he was doing was perfectly fine. But as he shared with Janet during the reunion, at 52 years old, he now views his actions differently. His growth in this area is evidenced by his current behavior towards Janet. As Maya Angelou said, when you know better, you do better.
Sometimes we think that because we know better, other people know better as well. Or we think that because other people seem to know better or should know better that they actually do know better. But the reality is if they knew better they would have done better. Period. Nothing shows that you know better other than doing better. You can talk like you know better all day, but what are your actions saying.
I’ve had to learn this over the past few years as I learned to forgive people who’ve wronged me in blatant ways. Deepak Chopra often says that everyone is doing the best they can from their level of awareness. Some people don’t buy that notion, but I do. I think it explains a lot about why people do what they do. Sometimes we just don’t know better. It doesn’t make us/them bad people. We are just extremely misguided in that moment about that issue. This is the way I choose to look at people.
This line of thinking is extremely calming for me. It helps me to reach forgiveness faster. It helps me not take things personally (an area of challenge) because I remind myself that their actions are not about me. They are simply a reflection of where they are in their growth process. So, why am I weighing myself down with this burden?
Forgiveness is an Act of Self-Care
Forgiveness is not always reachable immediately after we’ve been wronged. That’s ok. Sometimes we just need a moment. Forgiveness also is not a declaration that what the other person did wasn’t wrong. If they are wrong before we forgive them, they will still be wrong after.
Forgiveness is simply an act of self-care. It’s something that allows us to move beyond the moment and accept that while we may be a casualty of the moment, the moment wasn’t ever about us and so we don’t have to continue carrying that pain with us.
Watching Janet’s reunion with Will, it was plain to see that she’d held on to the pain for a long time. It’s even evident in her 2018 freestyle video dissing Will. She has been carrying around a heavy load. I wish that their forgiveness moment had come sooner for her. It would have been one less difficult thing for her to deal with over these years.
She’s dealt with a lot. She’s become infamous in a way that interfered with her career. As I noted earlier, it was so easy for me to believe a narrative about her being a difficult woman without any evidence other than this feud. (I’m sure this is a deeper issue surrounding the general narrative of Black women being stereotyped as difficult, but that’s a conversation for another day). No one can deny that she has been through a lot. Forgiving could have released one less burden.
And even though this apology from Will didn’t come until almost 30 years later, I’m a firm believer that forgiveness and closure are solo acts. We need not have an apology from the party that wronged us in order to forgive. (Even if we get an apology, that may not make it any easier to forgive anyway.) The choice is always our own based on whether we want to continue to carry the weight of the hurt and anger (because holding on to it serves some purpose for us) or whether we want to be at more peace. Kudos to her for choosing to forgive.
Sometimes Family Are the Ones Who Require us to Forgive the Most
Throughout the reunion, the cast referred to themselves as a family. We know them as a family. And in many ways this pain between Will and Janet is reminiscent of some of the pain present between members of our own families.
Wounds that have yet to be healed. Wrongs that have yet to be made right. Hurt that has continuously been swept under the rug. Because we have often had to spend so much time with them, family can often be the people who hurt us the most. Knowingly or unknowingly.
The flip side of that is that our families offer us ample opportunities to practice the art of forgiveness. So as we enter this holiday season, let’s allow this discussion around forgiveness to move us toward healing and forgiveness within our own families.
