“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Intellectually, I know forgiving someone who has hurt me goes a long way in healing my emotional scars, but actually doing it is tough as hell. Sometimes I think I’ve been successful but later realize I’ve forgiven no one. All the pain is still there hurting as bad as it did years ago, sometimes worse.
There are many I have forgiven but that was from a couple decades ago. It is the people from my days of using crystal meth that I am having some difficulty forgiving. I was so naïve, so unprepared for what I was getting into, and had no experience dealing with these kind of people.
Perhaps it’s such a tangled mess of confusion that I am still trying to sort it out in my head of what really happened. If I am unsure of what was real and what was not real, how am I to forgive?
All I know is it’s not as easy as I would like it to be. I have to be clear on who I am forgiving and what I am forgiving them for. Otherwise my act of forgiveness will be as cloudy as my memories and hold no real value – like going through the motions with no meaning behind them.
What has helped me forgive is knowing I can take the power back by taking it away from those who hurt me. I am the one who has control of my life and not them. My greatest weapon against them is my ability to forgive and to move on with my life and be happy.
I feel stronger than I use to be when I started using crystal meth because I lived through it and am now clean. I often wonder where many of those people are right now. Are they still using or clean? Are they still playing their games? I do know two of them are dead. One was my roommate/boyfriend and I use that term loosely. He was not an especially good partner, but neither was I, at least not on meth.
I have even forgiven him even though he is dead. Wherever he is in the afterlife, I hope it at least lessens his guilt if he had any because I don’t want to ruin a person’s afterlife.
We all make mistakes and in the end, we all want forgiveness for the crap we’ve done.
Tags: anger, bitterness, crystal meth, emotional, forgive, forgiveness, forgiving, human behavior, human interest, Mahatma Gandhi quote, pain, positive psychology, spirituality, wronged
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