I know every every piece of advice, every regularly endorsed opinion on the topic because I’ve scoured my way through the literature. I’ve read every blog post about letting go of anger. I’ve written down quotes and stuck them on my wall. I know that no part of it is simple. I know the gap between “deciding to forgive” and actually feeling peace can seem entirely unbridgeable. I know.
Forgiveness is a vast, un-traversable land for those of us who crave justice. The very thought of letting someone walk away scot-free from what they’ve done makes us sick. We don’t want to simply wipe our hands clean. We want to transfer the blood onto theirs. We want to see the scores evened and the playing field leveled. We want them to bear the weight of what they’ve done, not us.
I think forgiveness seems like the ultimate betrayal of myself. i think i don’t want to give up the fight for justice after what has happened to me. The anger is burning inside me and pumping toxicity throughout my system. i am well aware of that, but i just can’t let it go. The anger is as inseparable a part of me as my heart or mind or lungs. I know the feeling. I know the second heartbeat that is fury.
But here’s the thing about anger: it’s an instrumental emotion. I stay angry because I want justice. Because I think it’s useful. Because I assume that the angrier I am, the more change I will be capable of incurring. Anger doesn’t realize that the past is over and the damage has been done. It tells me that vengeance will fix things. It’s on the pursuit of justice.
Except the justice I want isn’t always realistic. Staying angry is like continually picking the scab off a cut because I think that if I keep the wound open, I won’t get a scar. It’s thinking that someday, the person who wronged me can come give me stitches with such incredible precision that I’ll never know the cut was once there. The truth about anger is that it’s nothing more than the refusal to heal, because I’am scared to. Because I’am afraid of who i’ll be once my wounds close up and I have to go on living in my new, unfamiliar skin. I want my old skin back. And so anger tells me to keep that wound bleeding.
When I’m seething, forgiveness seems impossible. I want to be capable of it, because intellectually I know it’s the healthiest choice to make. I want the peace forgiveness offers. I want the release. i want the madness in my brain to quiet down, and yet I cannot find a way to get there.
Because here’s what they all fail to tell us about forgiveness: It’s not going to fix anything. It’s not an eraser that will wipe away the pain of what’s happened to us. It does not undo the pain that we’ve been living with and grant us immediate peace. Finding peace is a long, uphill battle. Forgiveness is just what we take to stay hydrated along the way.
Forgiveness means giving up hope for a different past. It means knowing that the past is over, the dust has settled and the destruction left in its wake can never be reconstructed to resemble what it was. It’s accepting that there’s no magic solution to the damage that’s been caused. It’s the realization that as unfair as the hurricane was, we still have to live in its city of ruins. And no amount of anger is going to reconstruct that city. we have to do it ourselves.
Forgiveness means accepting responsibility – not for causing the destruction, but for cleaning it up. It’s the decision that restoring our own peace is finally a bigger priority than disrupting someone else’s.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean we have to make amends with who hurt us. It doesn’t mean befriending them, sympathizing with them or validating what they have done to us. It just means accepting that they’ve left a mark on us. And that for better or for worse, that mark is now our burden to bear. It means we’re done waiting for the person who broke us to come put us back together. It’s the decision to heal our own wounds, regardless of which marks they’re going to leave on our skin. It’s the decision to move forward with scars.
Forgiveness isn’t about letting injustice reign. It’s about creating our own justice, our own karma and our own destiny. It’s about getting back onto our feet and deciding that the rest of our life isn’t going to be miserable because of what happened to us. It means walking bravely into the future, with every scar and callous we’ve incurred along the way. Forgiveness means saying that we’re not going to let what happened to us define us any longer.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean that we are giving up all of our power. Forgiveness means we’re finally ready to take it back.