“There is no love without forgiveness, and there is no forgiveness without love.”

Bryant H. Mcgill

One of the hardest things in life is learning to forgive yourself, yet it is also one of the most important lessons to learn.

Forgiveness is so often fake. You know how it feels to hold on to a grudge for someone else, to pretend things are all right when in truth you’re boiling inside. That fake smile. That false laughter. It’s like shaking someone’s hand while hiding a knife behind your back. We do that with others. But far more often, I think, we do that to ourselves. We like to say we have forgiven. We like to pretend it’s water under the bridge. But you know. Oh you know, deep down, that you’re still holding on. Clinging. I know I have. We can go through our entire lives clinging to what we did, but to do that is to live in constant warfare against ourselves. To what end? To what benefit?

I don’t think the world is any better for it. I think the world needs you, not at odds with yourself, but at peace with yourself. This troubled world needs what you can only give when you have first forgiven yourself of all that you have done. Because to forgive is to set free, and only in freedom can the spirit transcend the inherent tragedies of life.

If you can’t forgive yourself, as Curtis Sittenfield said, you will always be an exile in your own life.

True forgiveness is an art. It’s easy to pretend to let things go, to move on, to put the shadows in a dark corner of our minds. But to really let go, to really move on despite what we did or what we failed to do – that is hard. Because unlike the mistakes others have made, unlike the bad things others have brought into our lives, the things we have done are a part of us, a darkness that rose out of our own hearts.

The mistakes we have made are personal in such a deep way, because we have no one else to blame for them but ourselves. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that we are our own worst critics, our own worst judge and jury, so ready to condemn, so eager to scorn, so ruthless in our opinions of us.

How do you forgive yourself? I can’t tell you that, because it is something that differs for everyone. But there is one thing I know: when you forgive yourself in truth, you can feel it. The pain of the past, the wounds we inflict on ourselves, those never go away. It will always be there, an ache in our hearts like longing, a scar imprinted on our spirits like the wrinkles of time imprinted on our skin.

It’s okay to feel those pains.

It’s okay that they are still there, for we learn from them.

It’s part of being human, to carry a burden with us through life.

The difference is how you feel about it.

When you have not forgiven yourself, you hate yourself. There is anger, derision, and cruelty, and you exalt in feeling it because you think you deserve it. But you don’t. You have suffered enough.

When you forgive yourself, you stop looking at those wounds with hate. You stop condemning yourself.

Instead, you look at your mistakes with love. An aching sort of love that I cannot name, but I know how it feels. What is this feeling really? Is it the acceptance of our imperfection? Is it the yearning for what life could have been? Is it the realization that the wounds have helped us grow into who we are? Is it the absence of something we lost? Or is it just the dull throb of the past, like a bruise that never heals?

I do not know, but I don’t think it matters. All that matters is that you forgive yourself. That you let go of the poison, and accept the scars that you have earned. To more forward with understanding. To move forward with love for yourself, in spite of everything. To live on. Because in the end, that’s what we must do. Live on, and keep on living, because where there is life, there is hope. Always hope.

And hope is worth fighting for.