A lot of clichés exist about forgiveness. You find them in every piece of advice, in every endorsed opinion, in blogs about letting go of the anger. You read them in quotes and stuck them on post-it notes to a wall. You know that there is no simple task to forgive and it seems like a gap exists between deciding to forgive and feeling peace.
Forgiveness is a vast land for those who crave justice, and the very thought of letting someone walk away free from what they’ve done makes you sick. You don’t want to wipe your hands clean. You want them to bear the weight of what they’ve done, not you. You want to see the scores evened. Sometimes, forgiveness seems like the ultimate betrayal, and you can’t give up the fight for justice after what had happened to you. The anger is burning inside and pumping toxicity throughout your system, but you know that you can’t let it go. The anger is as inseparable from you as your mind and heart.
But the thing about anger is that it doesn’t realize that the past is over and that the damage has been done. Anger is the refusal to heal because when you’re scared, you’re afraid of who you’ll be once the wounds close up and you have to go on living as the new you. Forgiveness is healthier because it brings peace, it brings release when you want the madness in your brain to quiet, but you can’t find a way to get there. Nobody tells you this about forgiveness: it’s not going to fix anything because it is not an eraser that wipes away the pain of what’s happened to you. It doesn’t undo the pain you’ve been living with and grant you immediate peace. Finding peace is a long and arduous battle.
Forgiveness means giving up hope for a different past. It means acknowledging that the past is over, the dust has settled, and the destruction left can never be reconstructed. There is no magic solution to the harm that’s been caused, but you still have to live. Forgiveness means restoring your peace. Forgiveness doesn’t mean to make amends with who hurt you; it doesn’t mean befriending them, sympathizing with them or validating what they’ve done to you. It’s just accepting that they had left a mark on you, and that, for better or worse, the mark is your burden to bear. It means that you’re done waiting for the ones who broke you to come and put you back together. It’s you who decides to heal your wounds and to move forward.
Forgiveness isn’t about letting the injustice reign. It’s about creating your justice, your destiny, reinventing yourself. It’s about getting back on your feet and deciding that the rest of your life isn’t going to be unhappy because of what happened to you. It means walking bravely into the future with every scar you’ve incurred along the way. Forgiveness means that what happened to you won’t define you any longer. Forgiveness doesn’t mean that you give up your power, but it means that you’re finally taking it all back.
Love,
Carmen Monica
Carmen Monica Oprea 