I'm sorry. I don't in any way wish to tell Rachel that she is wrong to feel offended and hurt, and Rachel, if it read that way to you, my sincere apologies.
This is me trying to examine my own knee-jerk assumptions, so that I don't automatically leap to the worst possible interpretation of her actions -- which is pretty much my first impulse here. As I said in my post, I'm trying to approach this from the direction of hoping that RHB's apology is sincere, because I want this to be the first step in something good after so much bad. (The alternative is that there's just more bad, and I don't want to hope for that.) This isn't the same thing as actually assuming she's sincere -- like I said, I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt for now, but not trusting -- but it does mean I'm looking for possible evidence of sincerity, and then weighing that against the likelihood of its validity. What I was trying to get at is that when I attempt to do that here, with Rachel saying "here's how you can make restitution with me" and RHB failing to do so . . . it basically doesn't work. I am indeed tying myself in knots to impute good -- but then stepping back and saying, uhhhh, that's an awfully convoluted knot there, Occam's razor says this is probably bogus. I don't think the latter part came through very well at all. (That's what "the best I can do" was meant to convey, and didn't really do. I probably should not have tried to write that comment right before going to bed.)
no subject
This is me trying to examine my own knee-jerk assumptions, so that I don't automatically leap to the worst possible interpretation of her actions -- which is pretty much my first impulse here. As I said in my post, I'm trying to approach this from the direction of hoping that RHB's apology is sincere, because I want this to be the first step in something good after so much bad. (The alternative is that there's just more bad, and I don't want to hope for that.) This isn't the same thing as actually assuming she's sincere -- like I said, I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt for now, but not trusting -- but it does mean I'm looking for possible evidence of sincerity, and then weighing that against the likelihood of its validity. What I was trying to get at is that when I attempt to do that here, with Rachel saying "here's how you can make restitution with me" and RHB failing to do so . . . it basically doesn't work. I am indeed tying myself in knots to impute good -- but then stepping back and saying, uhhhh, that's an awfully convoluted knot there, Occam's razor says this is probably bogus. I don't think the latter part came through very well at all. (That's what "the best I can do" was meant to convey, and didn't really do. I probably should not have tried to write that comment right before going to bed.)