When people think of forgiveness the focus often turns to the other person. What they did wrong. Why they should apologize. How hurt they made you feel. How you’ll never be the same. We become a victim to their actions and feel that we can’t be free until they understand just how much they hurt us.
I’ve been there. I’ve carried that weight so many times I’m surprised that my back didn’t break over and over again. I’m not talking about petty arguments, though the sheer weight of those I’m sure would break me if I let it. I’ve been bullied, abused, taken advantage of, left, lost, and broken by so many people over the years. Close family, intimate partners, and even strangers.
Over and over again my life has been one type of abuse after another. If you knew my story you would probably tell me that I had a right to be angry. That I had the right to never forgive the people who hurt me. That the people deserved anything terrible that happened to them.
But I can’t carry that weight either. I can’t live carrying the weight of the people who hurt me and my own anger and resentment.
I am reminded of the story of Sisyphus. I can see him rolling that boulder uphill over and over again and the anger, frustration, sadness, and shame as it rolled back down over and over again. For me, as I have come to understand it, is what holding on to anger and resentment is. I’m literally torturing myself by trying to carry all the things that have happened with me as if I couldn’t just set them down and keep moving forward.
And that’s what forgiveness is, ultimately. It’s the setting down of the burdens that you thought you had to carry. It’s the realization that you don’t have to carry them anymore. That you can not only move on – but move forward.
Perhaps even more profound is that after you set down the things that people did to you, you find that you have to forgive yourself. That you’ve been carrying anger and shame and frustration at yourself the whole time. Why? Because you let someone take advantage of you. You let someone hurt you. You let someone abuse or bully you. This is how I’ve seen it as I’ve come to forgive those people from my past.
I’ll even tell you why. Because I’ve come to understand that regardless of when these things happened to me, whether I was a child and it was an adult or classmate, or whether I was an adult in a situation I knew was bad, all those people, and me, were doing the best we could.
I really don’t believe that people get up in the morning wondering how they can fuck someone over today. Or how they can completely destroy someone’s self-worth. Or how many times they plan to hit a person or how many fights they plan to get in. But there are still people who do this, but if God came down to me right now and told me all the people, past, present, and future who would do (or did things) things that would hurt me, and said that they were doing the very best they could I would believe it.
I have to believe that if they knew what they were doing – or knew a better way – they would have been doing it. But they didn’t. They were acting as the very best person they knew how to be in that moment in time. I know I was. I was trying my damn best, so how could I assume that they were any different?
As this came into my awareness I suddenly saw my life very differently. I was able to forgive so many people for so many things, and more importantly, I was able to forgive myself for any of the things I was blaming myself for from those situations. I was able to set down all the things that I thought I had to hold onto because I had the right to hold onto that anger and resentment. I realize now that I sure do have the right – but it’s not a right I want to hold onto anymore.
Instead, I’m choosing to love them, and my self, because we’re all just doing the very best we can.
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