For many years, well-intending friends advised me to forgive those who abused me, who took me for granted, who disrespected me.
Every time, rage bubbled in me; every time, I caught it just after a flash of anger sparked in my eyes and scorched my features. “I’ve forgiven them enough times; I forgave them so many times, from the beginning. I’m done with forgiveness. It does nothing more than give them freedom to harm again.”
So, I won’t forgive them; but I understand my friends’ concerns: The hate and rage is killing me, even if I control it — generally.
I keep looking back at my life, at the men who’ve wronged me, at the employers, at the people I considered friends, at the doctors whom I trusted to tend to my health.
I’ve realized:
It’s not forgiveness I need. It is pretense to forgive these people who have not paid for their crimes, who have asked for no forgiveness, who do not even usually acknowledge their wrong-doing; I don’t forgive them — and, if they don’t think they’ve done anything wrong, they’ll not want to be forgiven.
I realize now: The inclination that I forgive myself touches on the truth of what I need, even if it doesn’t feel exactly right.
I don’t hold myself responsible for what happened to me, aside from knowing that I made choices I can no longer change.
But I wind up looking back; and when I look back, I’m enraged.
It was not until today that I realized my stuck-point:
I hate that I can’t change the past.
Do you ever recall an event that ended unpleasantly and wish you could go back to change it; and, while you continue on in life, your mind spirals and conspires in retrospect to come up with the perfect comeback, the perfect joke, the perfect action that would have worked so much better than whatever-it-was-you-actually-did?
I do, constantly.
Looking back on the overwhelmingly painful trauma I suffered (survived?), I find my mind replacing actions, defending myself where I hadn’t, publicly walking away from my abusers, asking others for help, yelling for attention, rebelling against the maltreatment I received. Leaving deliberately, even if I had to sneak away.
I’d do anything such that things didn’t happen as they did.
But they did. I’m here in my home and it’s January 12, 2021; and I lived through an abusive marriage resulting in an abusive child; and I have cancer.
I repeat these truths because they are reality. I can’t change those facts; I can’t hope them away; I can’t deny those events — and denying them won’t make them go away (even if the man I married said it would.)
Accepting these realities quenches the molten anger within me. My mind calms; I am saddened, but no longer am I perpetually seeking a way to remake the past.
I cannot, after all, return to the past and remake it, re-live it. I cannot unmake my mistakes nor unlive the pain.
Is this forgiveness of myself, then? Is this the yielding, the letting-go of the past that’s spoken of?
I find a washing-away of the rippling anger, of the demanding insistence that I fix those broken moments, that I correct those mis-aligned coordinates, that I somehow find a way to break through time and become someone I am not now.
And, in this washing-away, I find my mind freed to consider alternative solutions to the problems at hand. I find my mood bolstered by the achievements I make, no matter how small. And, better than everything, I find I’m making changes towards a different life that feels better, more stable, more true to me.
I don’t think there’s one way to get here, to the state of mind where one can abandon anger and the urgent sense of need to remake the past. I’m not even sure everyone has such a sense, those who’ve survived trauma.
But if, like me, you’ve taken on a burden of responsibility to learn to time-travel, perhaps look at that idea as a reality:
Unless you’re a quantum physicist or molecular biologist (or some other specialized scientist who works in such spheres), you’re not likely to have the resources to even begin research into how to travel back to your trauma and unmake it.
But, by all means, mull over doing so, if it helps you.
I realized that I am not able to; the best I can do is to rewrite history by concocting fictions based on my reality, or by fabricating fantasies of what-might-have-been.
Lucky me: I’m a writer. I can do these things without ever needing to travel through time. And, in this, I am free.
What’s your stuck-point? What are the pieces of advice that snag on your sensibilities and trigger your anger, despite all well-meaning intents?
Would accepting the reality of the situation help quell your rage and allow you to find solutions?
