Some of us chose retirement, and others were squeezed out or forced out of jobs earlier than they had hoped. Or maybe it got so bad you just said, screw it, I’m out of here.

If you’re still sad or angry about what happened to you at work, perhaps it’s time to accept and forgive. Here’s my spin on it. Almost like a variation of Festivus with the airing of workplace grievances. It helps to laugh.

Even though I made it to the finish line relatively unscathed, I had one awful job toward the end of my career that left me feeling quite bitter.

I try not to think about it much, but last week I was digging through files on my computer looking for an old picture of me with adorable hair, because you, know, the struggle is real, when I found a folder marked MFR.

What was this? I double-clicked, and there it was. A detailed chronicle of the one job I’ve tried to forget. A Memorandum for Record is what I called it – a long and painful documentation of bad behaviors and harassment that pretty much left me crying every day for a year.

As I read through my notes with fresh eyes, I finally realized it wasn’t all about me. I was caught in a web of complex corporate norms and cut-throat politics.

There were bad actors in high places, weak lieutenants and one low-level sociopath who lived on the blood of destruction. Everyone else operated under the theory that only the whale that surfaces gets harpooned.

In the end, I came out whole, better than whole, so I decided to accept and forgive. I just said, this is it, no more. Bitterness is not an emotion I want to live with. And I’ll say this, something about letting go just makes you feel better in every way. I feel lighter. A weight has been lifted.

True, there’s no forgiveness in my heart for the sociopath or the person who provided top cover, so acceptance will have to suffice. I decided to just accept that what happened happened and release myself from the internal drama … almost like being an observer, watching the whole thing from afar. As a result, they no longer live rent-free in my head. That seems like a fair trade.

Anyway, that’s my perspective, and I guess it applies to just about any negative emotions we can’t quite dump. Maybe we can move on if we keep trying.

Donna Pekar is an aging badass (for real) who lives in California and writes Retirement Confidential.

My hometown of Barrington, Rhode Island was a place where water was our playground and the creatures within and around it were our playthings. Some creatures we feared, like eels and toe grinders and biting horseflies; some we harmed, like the small jelly fish we threw at each other and the mussels we smashed on the rocks. In the woods, we feared a mythical group of mean boys we dubbed the Kids of the Path; at the water, we ruled as the Kids of the River.

The river smelled of salt and mud and things that died in the eelgrass and then washed ashore to bake in the sand under the midday sun. At the edge, at low tide, we hunted clams by walking barefoot in the soft mud, waiting for the small shoot of water, and digging down to capture the escaping mollusk, which we would then crack open and eat. We climbed on the slimy rocks that hugged the water’s edge, popping seaweed bubbles and gathering treasures to mix into magic potions with bayberries, discarded fiddler crab shells, salt water, and sand.

At high tide, when we preferred to swim, the shallows were ripe with horseshoe crabs the size of dinner plates. We were afraid of their horns that could stick straight up and pierce a foot, but also fascinated by their prehistoric creeping along the sandy bottom. There were fish that swam around us, and waving seaweed that stuck to our legs when we splashed around and swam from beach to dock to raft. The boys swam out to the sand bar where the blue crabs and the toe grinders lived, or all the way across to the opposite shore, their heads bobbing farther and farther away like buoys in the glinting sun among the speedboats and the sailboats. We girls would row a small boat to the opposite shore to visit the library and get Dusty Sundaes at the Newport Creamery.

We were semi-wild, unsupervised, and almost savage sometimes in our games, our daring, and our occasional harming of sea creatures. It was our summer playground, our compass point in a childhood that held space for adventure and raw joy. As we grew and went our separate ways in the world, where a couple of us would die young, many of us would find happiness, and most would live long, we would all remember the river.

Lee Stevens is a writer and a weaver enjoying retirement in the mountains of Western North Carolina