Forgiveness
Simply put, forgiveness is the key. Things are going to happen to you in your life. Bad things. Maybe they already have. Doesn’t matter. No one is going to get out of this thing without being subjected to some terrible events. We are creatures of light and dark. And wherever there is bright light there are dark, dark shadows. Which means that you are going to be forced to choose. Most of us choose to remain in pain, becoming bitter, jaded, cynical, or just mean. It is the principal reason that there are so many assholes in this world. We don’t deal with the events that happened to us. How they made us feel, how they scared us, how they created walls and blockages in our minds. Instead, we build over the scarred tissue. We adapt and contort our lives to avoid pain. And in doing so we become mentally and physically malformed, contorted to the point of becoming unrecognizable. The answer is and always has been forgiveness.
A lot of terrible, horrible things have happened to me. When I was fifteen my father pointed a loaded gun at me in front of a friend. As if the first fourteen years of abuse weren’t enough. I have had three separate and deliberate attempts on my life since then. I have nine confirmed concussions. In my early 20s my best friends growing up decided to all ghost me at the same time. I have been cheated on, betrayed, abandoned, humiliated, emasculated, ridiculed, robbed, stabbed, burned, punched, kicked, spit on, and how many more things do I need to write? It has been a hard road. Really hard. I like to say that I have always played the video game of my life on Extreme difficulty. Except that it wasn’t a video game. We don’t respawn when we die.
All these things that occurred in my life have added up. I am fortunate to have developed, within myself, the drive and tenacity to change at an early age. This is why, now in my mid-30s, when I became aware of the fact that I again needed to change, it has been less of a monumental undertaking. I have always resolutely tried to turn the other cheek. To open myself up and remain gentle and kind to the world. It hasn’t always worked. It seems downright impossible at times. This is why, when I became aware of how negative, cynical, jaded, and defensive I was, I had to come to terms with it. I was miserable! Life had turned from the mystic to the myopic. I had had so many things actually happen that it wasn’t just anxiety anymore. My paranoia had manifested in actual events. It wasn’t just a mental construct. My walls were necessary. I had pushed the world away and built my walls high. The problem is that no one can live that way for long. Neither the people inside the walls nor the ones who want to get in. And the only way to start to deconstruct those walls is to learn how to let some of this stuff go. To learn how to forgive.
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Now I could go on and on about anger and the constituent emotions that stem from trauma. But I am not a shrink and who cares anyway. The important part to take away from this is that your anger and your emotions only hurt you. The person that robbed or belittled you is not going to suffer because of your feelings. They don’t spend any time thinking about what they did. They have moved on to the next victim and you are stuck behind. The absolute only thing that you can control about interacting with these people is how you respond and how you feel about it.
The hardest part of all this to understand is that your emotions are completely under your control. I get it. They are overwhelming. I still have anxiety and panic attacks. I am oftentimes a walking example of how my emotions are not under control. But under all those layers of adaptation and contortion, you are the one making the decisions. You are the one behind the wheel. Counseling and therapy are incredibly useful because it helps you to understand this fact. When you can peel back the layers of your onion and find out what makes you tick the way you do, you regain the feeling of control. You never really lost it. You just made the machinery of your engine too complicated to fully grasp. When you can break down your reaction and turn it into a response then you are no longer on the hood of the car swerving on the freeway. You are behind the wheel. And when you can regain control of these powerful emotions you are then able to start to let them go.
Isn’t that just a bitch? Everyone keeps telling you, over and over, to let it go. Fuck them, right? What do they know? They have no idea how… scared you are. Wait, what? Scared? Not me! I’m angry! I am powerful! I am too tough to be scared! I am… scared that it will happen again. Which is why I am angry. Avoidant. Cynical and jaded. Reserved. I am too scared to let the pain go because it has become so much of who I am. The coping strategies that I employ to deal with my traumas have come to be the very measurements that I define myself by. My passions, joys, and humor all come from these same adaptations. And now you are telling me that I am scared? And that most of the constituent parts of me are all, at least partially, based on fear? On top of that, you are telling me to just let it go? And on top of that, I am supposed to just forgive these people? And myself??
Well, fuck.
But that’s exactly it. We start our lives innocent and free. When we are introduced to pain we adapt. We spend the rest of our lives trying to either avoid pain or channel it into various things. Most of the time we don’t even know we are doing it. And then one day you are unhappy, and you don’t know why. Of course, everything is much more complex and complicated than this. But the answer is not. Forgiveness. Such a simple word, yet the hardest thing in life to achieve. Because when we can truly forgive others, we release ourselves from whatever it is that happened. We will never be able to go back in time and change things. What has happened, has happened. But what we can do is release ourselves from it. The exact permanence of history is the exact reason that the present and future are so malleable. We are here because of what has happened and, with that knowledge, we can then make the conscious decision to let it go. We can decide to forgive, not be angry, not be afraid, to turn the other cheek, and move on. Oftentimes we are afraid to do this.
In the past, I have been addicted to the pain. It is terrifying to release it because then who would I be? What am I but the amalgamation of all of my actions and memories? And therein lies the answer: I am who I am right now. And by choosing to forgive and let it go, I am consciously taking control of the present and thus, the rest of my life. I am forgiving the past to allow for a future. This is the key to freedom.
