Today's topic: Forgiveness. This one is a biggie like Loyalty. However, instead of its continued presence in my life, it is the absence of forgiveness in my life that has affected me more.
I will be defining two things, forgiveness and forgetfulness. Forgiveness is the act of excusing a mistake or offense. Forgetfulness is unawareness caused by neglectful or heedless failure to remember. For me, the two are forever connected. My fiance told me once, "you have the curse of remembering what everyone else would rather forget." What this implies is that I hold grudges, and he is right, I do.
I have held grudges for as long as I can remember. I do not know if it is an innate tendency I have or if it is a behavior I picked up from my family members. All I know is that I have this nasty habit of remembering the faults of people before I remember any of the good. In my upbringing, I was taught that forgiveness is a good thing, that it will free me, and that good people forgive. And as much as I nodded and said I agreed, I also thought, "Stupid people forgive too, and then they get walked on again." And when it came to being good and stupid or bad and smart, I chose the latter.
My experience with forgiveness has been this: the more heinous a deed (or multiple deeds) a person does, the less forgivable is it, to me. Said deed(s) is or are less forgivable if the person a) hurt me or people I care about, b) shows no remorse at all for pain or chaos they have caused, or c) both. This is not the case with everyone. I have found that a lot of people I associate with forgive things that I myself find unforgivable. Granted, I think of myself as someone who has a high threshold for people's behavior. There is a lot I will take from people I love and people I care about. But I also have a line that, once crossed, can never be crossed again. It appears to me that for all of the arguing and bitching that people I know do, I'm the only one who's drawn such a line.
And not only that, but people I know are disturbed by my line. They see it and say, "Well, you're not one to piss off," and depending on how much they care about getting to know me, they back off or get closer. In a way, this line has done me a lot of good. It has filtered out a lot of people I would have deemed unworthy of being close to me in the first place. But then I see the others. Like my words on loyalty, I am jealous of how easily they can forget pain. Of how they can let go of people's wrongs and keep marching along like nothing ever happened in spite of the elephant that is always in the room. Many times, I want to be like that, until they get hurt again. By the same thing they forgave. It is always the elephant in the room that gets them. And then I smile to myself. "Stupid people forgive too, and then they get walked on again."
Forgiveness, forgetfulness, a third F: Fear. Fear of being hurt more than I already have been. Fear that I am the least forgivable person of all, in spite of what good I do. Fear of forgetting. Fear of forgiving. I am too scared to forgive others entirely. Why should I? To do so is to trust them, and from what I have seen, those that are forgiven rarely earn the trust they lost back. The ones that do throw it away; they weren't worth it. They rarely are. So why forgive them, why give them a pass they don't deserve?
Because it's what I would want, isn't it? If I acted in a manner that would cause me to ask, nay, beg for forgiveness, I would want it, wouldn't I? I wouldn't want someone to say yes and then hate me through a crooked smile. I wouldn't want someone to deny it to me. If I was truly sorry, I would want forgiveness. The thing is, how can I trust when other people are truly sorry? How can I trust that there are people like me out there who mean what they say? How can I trust the words "I'll never do it again, I promise" from a mouth that doesn't know how to keep a promise? I can't; not without admitting that I am putting myself in a place where I am vulnerable and depending on people who've already proven themselves unworthy to try and gain my trust back. The fear kicks in. It tells me, "Don't be stupid."
Forgiveness has always existed outside of my morality scale. It has always been something unattainable. I've seen it as well-intentioned but dangerous when put in human hands. The people I've come across in past times don't really seek forgiveness so much as forgetfulness. They can live happily if they think people forget what they've done. I'm not one of those people because, try as I can, I don't forget things. Big and small, I remember all of it and no amount of denial or deflection is going to make me forget. Actually, I think I would be more forgiving if people didn't deny or deflect when it comes to things they've done. Those are just lies on top of everything, a shot in the foot, really.
I guess there I have it: I need to be able to trust the person who asks for my forgiveness. And, funny thing, I don't trust a lot of people these days. Especially people that have breached that trust before. And yes, forgiveness needs to be asked for. You don't just break something and expect everything to be ok, you actually have to repair what's broken.
Forgiveness is at its heart a good thing. I think I'll incorporate more of it in my life, in a way that won't make me regret trusting people, of course.
Speaking of which, next (and last) time: Trust.
RG
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