There’s a saying that I’ve heard a million times if I’ve heard it once: Forgiveness is a gift you give yourself.
This is such a hard concept for me to grasp though. Yes, some people do shitty things. Yes, we have to move on with our lives if there’s any hope for us to have a prosperous future. But is forgiving someone always the best thing for you to do? How is it helping me by letting them off the hook for what they’ve done?
After endlessly searching for some way to move past an event that has been plaguing me for months without having to actually forgive the individuals involved, I came across this article about forgiveness by Heidi Priebe, staff writer for Thought Catalog.
And it knocked me on my ass.
For the first time, I finally understood why it is important for us to forgive others for our own healing. As Heidi writes in her article, we can’t change the past and resisting forgiveness is our weird little way of holding out hope that we can somehow change it by keeping the wound open rather than letting it heal over and become a scar of our past.
Whoa. Right?!
“Forgiveness isn’t about letting injustice reign. It’s about creating your own justice, your own karma and your own destiny. It’s about getting back onto your feet and deciding that the rest of your life isn’t going to be miserable because of what happened to you. It means walking bravely into the future, with every scar and callous you’ve incurred along the way. Forgiveness means saying that you’re not going to let what happened to you define you any longer.”
I’m all about equality and justice, sometimes to a fault. I believe that everyone deserves dignity and respect. Some people don’t think this way and these are usually the people who hurt us – the ones we have trouble forgiving. I hold grudges against these people and they are very hard to scrub away.
We can’t change who these people are. We can’t make them feel remorse or even make them apologize. Instead, we need to admit that we have bigger and better things to do than dwell on how they choose to live their lives and the decisions that they make. We don’t have to wish them the best. We don’t have to do anything other than stop thinking about their whereabouts or going-ons. They are not our responsibility. The only responsibility we have is to ourselves. As the post so perfectly phrases:
“Forgiveness means accepting responsibility – not for causing the destruction, but for cleaning it up. It’s the decision that restoring your own peace is finally a bigger priority than disrupting someone else’s.”
Powerful stuff. Speaking of powerful, here’s the closing stanza that sealed the deal for me. If you have been holding out on forgiving someone and you don’t get chills after reading this, check your pulse. You might already be dead.
“Forgiveness doesn’t mean that you are giving up all of your power. Forgiveness means you’re finally ready to take it back.”
What. The. Fuck.
I want my power back. Don’t you? I’ve been left feeling like the wounded bird, the helpless victim, for way too long. Forgiveness isn’t a show of weakness. Forgiveness is power.
So this is it. This is the part when I say, “I don’t need your shittiness weighing me down anymore. It’s not helping me get where I’m going. Now if you’ll excuse, I have a mountain to climb and conquer.”
We don’t need to carry the unnecessary baggage of our past up the mountain with us. We’ve got a long way to climb and we don’t need anything to make the venture intentionally harder on ourselves.
I used to have a saying that helped me let go of stuff I was really angry about.
The kinder, gentler version of it was to metaphorically wrap something in a blanket and let it go.
For me, I liked to wrap my shit up in a blanket and drown it in the river.
I swear I’ve never actually done this to any living thing. I’ve only ever metaphorically “drowned” the intangible feelings that I have. There’s something about those feelings no longer having “life” to them that gives me peace and takes away their power.
Okay, enough about drowning things. Get to climbing!
Are you ready to forgive? Are you ready to take back your power? I’d love to hear your thoughts about this concept, if you want to leave a comment below.