I'll Pass on Forgiveness

It has been several days since I saw the post on Instagram, and it continues to irritate me.

“Weak people revenge. Strong people forgive. Intelligent people ignore.”

The part about weak people seeking revenge did not bother me. The claim that intelligent people ignore did, at least somewhat. Is ignoring, blinded by the rainbows and unicorns of today’s fashionable version of positive culture, truly a sign of intelligence?

But the phrase that stayed with me is about strength. Strong people forgive.

Photo by Clemens van Lay on Unsplash

I thought about that line for a long time. The quiet expectation embedded within it is that we should forgive even when certain acts are simply unforgivable.

I cannot forgive the person who sexually abused me when I was a child.

Would the author of those words tell a woman who had been raped that she lacks strength if she cannot forgive? Would they say the same to a parent whose child has been murdered?

It is easy to preach, isn’t it? Be kind to those who wronged you. Forgive because forgiveness is healthy. Be the bigger person.

For years I believed that message. I believed it so deeply that I often felt like a failure for not being able to live up to it. I wondered if my inability to forgive meant there was something broken within me.

Looking back now, I sometimes wonder how much damage that belief itself caused.

Forgiveness was not necessary for my healing. In many ways, it became an obstacle.

My life had already been shaped by false self-blame, by a distorted sense of responsibility for something that was never mine to carry. For years I believed the shame belonged to me.

It did not.

The first real step toward healing did not come from forgiveness. It came from allowing myself to acknowledge something far less socially acceptable: my anger and even my hatred toward him.

As days of anger turned into months, another realization surfaced. Some things in life are not forgivable.

Accepting that truth felt like a thousand-pound weight lifting from my chest. Decades of being trapped in moments of abuse began to loosen their grip. The distorted belief that I had somehow been culpable as a child slowly unraveled.

My anger and hatred did not appear because I was weak. They appeared because the abuse was unforgivable.

Before I could move forward, I had to allow those emotions to exist. Not just the hurt, but the rage beneath it.

Time does not heal everything, but it has created distance between my anger and myself. Over the years the sharpness of that anger has slowly dulled.

I do not believe I will ever stop hating him.

But I have stopped centering him in my life.

For years, in my attempts to become the kind of strong person who forgives, I remained focused on him and on what he had done to me rather than on the damage left within me. The damage I needed to heal.

He is not part of my healing.

I no longer carry the burden of trying to forgive him. Healing, I have come to learn, is not about proving strength. It is about allowing space for vulnerability and learning to sit with difficult emotions without turning them inward as self-harm.

On this journey, I am responsible only for my own actions, my reactions, and my well-being as I move forward.

I was never responsible for the abuse, and I am not responsible for the abuser.

Forgiveness is not required for my healing.

Forgiving him would not make me strong.

What makes me strong is continuing forward and continuing to heal despite the damage he left behind.

So I will pass on the forgiveness.

_____
More essays:
Lost in Gender Identification & Sexuality
Culpability in Mr. Jordan Neely's Death
Why Are We Not Fighting the Right Battles When It Comes to Women’s Rights?
Was I Wrong to Have Accused White Men?
Are You Hustling?

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