This Is How You Finally Learn To Forgive Yourself

You know that first real day of spring, the one that reminds you the long, cold nights of winter are coming to an end? People on the subway have soft smiles, and you can feel the energy rising from every borough. A fresh start is inevitable.

You stand outside with just a sweatshirt on, your face pointed towards the sky, the sun thawing out the last three months of heartbreak that still lives in your veins. You take what feels like the first deep breath you’ve taken in months. You’re finally on the other side.

This is how I see forgiveness.

From my experience, it is much easier to forgive others than it is to forgive myself. I have been on the receiving end of some serious heartbreak, but lately, after some much needed soul-searching, I’ve realized that I am the one to blame for the hurt and pain that has been caused in my own life. This revelation didn’t come easily, my initial reaction was to blame literally anyone else. Because it’s so easy to blame other people, right?

“Well, they broke me.”

They lied, they cheated, they didn’t do what they said they were going to do. I’m sure we can all come up with an excuse as to why we did what we did. But other people’s accountability has nothing to do with us, and I don’t want to live in that realm of placing blame anymore. I can point fingers and run all I want, but where is the healing in that? Where is the growth? I want to know how my choices got me into the shitty situations in the first place.

I want to sit in it. I want to take accountability for my bullshit. I want to own the fact that I fucked up because I am hurt. And the one thing I know to be absolutely true about hurt people is that they hurt other people. So why is it that we say the meanest thing we can say instead of just expressing our true emotions? Why is it that we run when all we want to do is stay? Why do we shove people out of our lives when all we really want is to hold them close? These are the kind of questions that involve real work to discover the answers.

Work that comes with letting yourself feel it all. Get comfortable with the fact that you are not perfect. Find out why certain behaviors trigger you or make you feel unwanted, unwell, or unloved. That’s when we can actively turn around our situation.

I truly feel everyone is just doing their best with where they are at consciously. So, when we choose to elevate that level of consciousness by doing the healing kind of work, we do better and better. We let our mistakes guide us down a path that will lead to less mistakes, we stop hurting others, and more importantly, we stop hurting ourselves.

It will most definitely be the hardest thing we do, and we have to do it over and over again because it will always be worth doing. Life is messy, and we can avoid the mess and continue creating more chaos or we can dive into the rubbish. We can do the work to scrub it, clean it up, take what we need from it, and throw away what we don’t.

One shot—that’s all we get with this human experience. You deserve to spend it loving and being loved, learning, growing, and healing. You deserve to stand in the sun.

You can do it, you got this. We got this.

See you on the other side.