Forgiveness, or something like it…
Jack and I met a couple while having lunch at Thrive Bar, a delicious vegetarian cafe in Mt. Shasta City on our combined birthday-in-the-mountains trip in June. The two of them were living out of a brightly painted art van and running forgiveness workshops as they traveled around the west coast. There's something intriguing about how they built an entire practice and a life on wheels, making a living by getting other people to let go of grudges. I felt my own hesitation given my preference for acceptance over forgiveness.
I had read something a few years ago about how you don't have to forgive someone who did you real harm. You can work toward accepting what happened instead, and the acceptance does the job that forgiveness gets the credit for. I liked this idea years ago when I first ran into it, and I still like it now, perhaps because it doesn't require the other person to show up. Acceptance is something you can do alone, without anyone else's participation. Seeking forgiveness can feel like a transaction.
Then, this Daily Stoic piece landed in my inbox making almost the opposite case, or an alternate perspective to forgiveness. The gist was this: you don't control whether the person who hurt you ever understands what they did nor how it may have harmed you. You don't control their remorse. What you can control is yourself. Stop giving them space in your head. Forgive, or don't, but either way, stop handing over your energy.
I like both of these. I'm not sure they agree with each other, and I'm not going to pretend they do just to make a tidy essay out of it.
So.
This is where it gets personal.
I inherited a very specific piece of wiring from my father which is, never apologize. If you're confronted, you justify. You explain the reasoning. You fight back about why the thing you did made sense, given the circumstances, given what they did first, given something. Apology wasn't in the shared vocabulary. Defense was.
I've spent real years unlearning that. I now try to follow up with people and apologize when I know I've caused harm, and I say the actual words, ‘gulp’ "I'm sorry," which as a kid I avoided. I then allow space to listen. I've told myself this is growth, and mostly I think it is.
But to be honest, when I circle back and ask for forgiveness, some percentage of that is me wanting relief. I did something that hurt someone, and now want to hear it's okay so I can stop carrying it. That's not entirely about them. It's a bid for my own comfort dressed up as accountability. I'm not sure how much of my apology is repair and how much is me outsourcing my discomfort to the person I already hurt once, asking them to do a second piece of labor on my behalf: absolving me.
That's the uncomfortable part I don't have a clean resolution for. I think it means motives are rarely singular, and mine certainly aren't. This feels just as challenging when I turn the lens inward to reflect on ways that I’ve been hurt and harmed by others. I understand the desire for resolution and acknowledgement, but acceptance once again comes up as a practice.
When I let myself slow down, I can reflect on and accept that the things that happened to me happened. They are not separate from who I am now. I'm not interested in the version of healing that treats the harm as something to be extracted, leaving space for some purer, undamaged new self. I'd rather integrate it. Accept that it's load-bearing. Some of the sturdiest parts of how I show up now were built directly out of the things that hurt the most.
That's not forgiveness of the people involved, necessarily. Some of them never asked, and I'm not sure they'll ever understand what they did, and the Stoics are right that I don't get a vote on that. But accepting the shape it left in me, and even finding a way to love that shape, might be the more honest project.
I don't have this figured out yet. I'm not sure it's the kind of thing I'll ever figure out, so I will keep working on catching myself justifying instead of apologizing, noticing the selfish edge on the apologies that are real, and commit to the practice of forgiveness, or something like it.
How do you feel about forgiveness?
When do you say, "I'm sorry"?
