Learning To Forgive
a personal essay on how the idea of forgiving is complicated
I learnt about the word Forgiveness when I entered my thirties. Not that I didn’t know about it before, but something about the word wanted to be present all the time after I crossed my 30s.
Things I touched, books I read, movies I saw, and other experiences I lived started fluttering around this world like an annoying sound of a bee. It started to sting.
I had three major breakups in life. I accumulated a lot of pain and suffering during my teen years, but I also learned growth and self-awareness from these relationships.
Breaking up was hard, but it was inevitable. The period following every breakup was intense and full of misery. But I had to take it all in alone. There were days when I thought my head was too heavy, as if it would drop on the floor. And then there were days I did not see a flicker of the sunlight.
I waited for the time when it would all pass.
With time, I forgot I used to be in relationships with these beautiful guys. I had no choice but to keep all the good memories. In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth. I would unleash all hell if I kept living in the bad ones. So, truly, I had no choice. The places we travelled to; our times in the kitchen, in bed; all conversations about the universe of things – I kept with myself the order they brought to my life: I became a connoisseur of coffee and a voracious reader, and I sparked new interests towards life. I forgot that I had a dull life before.
I learned Forgetfulness before Forgiveness.
After this epic ruminative period, perhaps out of fear of the hurt, I gave up on the idea of relationships and marriage. I dreaded talking to guys, let alone the idea of being in love.
Admittedly, I became a stupid, passionless, lifeless human body. I was slowly quitting on things I built and became. I never hated these men for leaving me emotionally, for I have dealt with a lot worse from my father. But I hated them for leaving me in the middle of an awesome and exciting life. A life that I never thought I would live. Now, when I was living, it was taken away, again, just like my father did.
Ohh, these men.
For many years, I moved on with self-criticism. Occasionally, a conversation kept playing in my head, dwelling like an ugly shadow.
“I am not enough.”
“I don’t want to get loved.”
“I am such a pathetic person.”
“What kind of men did I date?”
“I hate men”
I became a victim of my own life. Everything became difficult - waking up, smiling, meeting friends, talking to my parents, travelling, connecting and every other beautiful thing that this universe carries in its basket. Disruption came unannounced in every task, and for a moment, I was losing it all.
Forgiveness meant nothing to me. Seriously. It was merely a word sitting in some dirty, dusty corner. Switching between nouns and verbs in random sentences. Sometimes, it stretched to a fine line of suffering. But it was never worth the importance it had. No one around me used it, in application or action. It just existed like most of the words in the Oxford Dictionary, waiting for its turn to be used in this egoist world.
Then, suddenly, it started speaking to me in silence.
It started happening when I couldn’t take my life forward. My Astrologer friend said, “It's a karmic disorder. ”
WHAT????
To sort out my inner fight and prolonged confusion, I turned to my mom, who, all her life, kept forgiving my dad. I realised that’s where my circuit of forgiveness would start. A common link between us. My Father. We both had our own episodes of events with my dad. For her, it was the crumbling of her marriage; for me, it was the loss of my childhood hero.
I never understood where her resilience and undefeated spirit came from. Despite all the horrific incidents, she chose to stay under the same roof as him.
It disturbed me to the point that my entire being was formed based on this one truth. Never leave the ones you love, no matter how badly they have treated you.
“Mom, you should divorce him”, I said once.
“That’s not how it works," she replied.
As a kid, I saw this as her failure. Not standing up for herself and giving too much in this relationship harmed her, evidently, yet the thought of leaving my father never crossed her mind.
I realised her idea of forgiveness was not something I was hoping for. Her forgiveness was linked to hope. An acute, thin line of uncertainty that the future may not hold the same. That one day, her kids would grow old and give her the life she deserved.
I hated her for this.
It was harming me more than it was doing good. When I started looking retrospectively, I realised it was Mom who was supposed to be forgiven first. This sudden awakening shuddered me deeply. Out of the many things that I wanted to inherit from her, this I don’t want to carry.
But it did become the source of the pain that I carried for years. It wasn’t my dad; with him, I had lost all hope. It was my mom whom I had to deal with. Slowly, it started to settle in. My love for life would accelerate if I forgave her.
I had to forgive her for forgiving my father.
All these years, a cure was always with me, hidden in the sublime of consciousness, holding onto me tightly, letting me break to remind me that no matter how deep a grave looks, a flower would always sprout on the surface.