Learning forgiveness and discrimination
by Candice
Credit card fraud caused a lot of stress
Here is one of the times when I was fully stressed out, and how I had to deal with the stress. When I was in my late teens about nineteen years old I had a family member ruin my credit. While I was in college she took out close to 5-6 credit cards in my name and maxed them out.
To be honest I was very young but I knew that I did not want a lot of credit at that time, so as far as I knew I only had one credit card and it was the one I personally took out myself and made regular payments on. Well, having my credit destroyed by a family member angered me enough, but it was the nonchalant attitude by this individual that really bothered me and got up under my skin. The fact that she tried to hide the credit cards fueled my fire even more.
When I finally gathered enough proof to confront this individual I really did go off the deep end. I started yelling and screaming and finally ended up bursting into tears. The person who committed the act still stood there as if she were unfazed by the whole incident and as if I was the person with the problem. This made me even angrier and I decided to just leave her presence because I felt she didn’t care and was being disrespectful to me.
Honestly it took me quite a few days to get over being angry. The person never called to explain or apologize. After feeling angry I realized that I really did feel betrayed and hurt that someone so close to me could blatantly lie and not even care how their actions were negatively affecting me. After analyzing the situation I realized that perhaps I should not have let my anger get the best of me by yelling and screaming at the individual because this solved very little to be honest. Although at the time I really did feel like I needed to get that pent up anger out of me.
As far as resolving the situation goes, well I learned to be very careful with people. I learned that sometimes people really don’t care about you no matter how close they are to you, and this is something you have to accept. I repeatedly asked for help paying these credit cards off but she claimed she couldn’t help me. Being a freshman in college I definitely was not in the place to pay the cards off and so my credit was ruined for nearly 7 years. Until all of the negative accounts rolled off my report.
I was young and now that I am a bit older and wiser I would have filed a civil suit against her to have the credit cards paid off, but I didn’t know any better back then. Now I have learned that I can’t walk around being angry at people for the negative things they have done to me - and this has greatly reduced my stress. I have learned to be more discriminating, and I have learned to trust my instincts about people and situations to hopefully avoid being placed in a situation like this one.
