I Forgive You

I spent a lot of time thinking about forgiveness at Muriel Wright.

The folding chairs were never comfortable enough to ignore your thoughts.

Not because anyone told me to.

Because recovery has a way of forcing old stories back to the surface.

People who hurt you.

People who betrayed you.

People who disappointed you.

People who took things from you.

People who never apologized.

For most of my life, I thought forgiveness was something you gave to another person.

An act of grace.

An act of mercy.

An act of compassion.

Something noble.

Something difficult.

Something they benefited from.

Then I realized I had it backward.

Forgiveness turned out to be one of the most selfish things I have ever done.

Not because it helped them.

Because it helped me.

The people I carried resentment toward were not spending much time thinking about me.

Most had moved on years ago.

Some probably forgot the events entirely.

A few may not have realized they hurt me in the first place.

Meanwhile, I was carrying them around everywhere.

Replaying conversations.

Revisiting arguments.

Rehearsing grievances.

Maintaining a relationship with events that had long since ended.

I thought I was carrying anger.

What I was actually carrying was attention.

And attention is expensive.

That realization changed everything.

Attention is finite.

Every hour spent reliving an old injury is an hour unavailable for something else.

A friendship.

A hobby.

A recovery meeting.

A book.

A walk.

A conversation.

A future.

The strange thing about forgiveness is that it does not require reconciliation.

It does not require trust.

It does not require forgetting.

It does not even require the other person to deserve it.

Sometimes they don’t.

Sometimes the harm was real.

Sometimes the apology never comes.

Forgiveness is not an endorsement of what happened.

It is a decision about how much of your future the past is allowed to occupy.

That was the lesson I carried out of recovery.

Not that everyone deserves forgiveness.

That I deserve freedom.

Recovery also forced me to confront a different truth.

There are people I hurt.

People who may never forgive me.

People who have every right not to.

For a long time, I carried those debts too.

I replayed those stories just as often.

Eventually I realized that guilt can become another way of remaining trapped in the past.

Making amends matters.

Taking responsibility matters.

Living differently matters.

But at some point, the future still has to begin.

There are people who wronged me.

There are people I wronged.

There are relationships that will never be repaired.

There are stories that cannot be rewritten.

I have made peace with that.

The older I get, the less interested I am in keeping score.

The less interested I am in maintaining a mental ledger of debts and trespasses.

The less interested I am in reserving space for stories that have already ended.

When I say, “I forgive you,” I no longer hear a gift.

I hear a release.

Not for them.

For me.