Thursday, June 3, 2010

A lesson on (un)forgiveness.

So, lets say there was a girl. She was a nice girl. Tall.
She had bushy hair and a soft voice. She wasn’t pushy, perhaps silently headstrong.
She was loyal, and considered herself righteous, whatever that means.

Said girl loves green-tea ice-cream, pays attention to poetry, loves the local news (however exciting or boring that day) and lacks an ability to forget faces, low-laying points of stories, stated facts, and nutritional information.

I guess you could call her detail oriented, but that misses the point. And she’s not about missing points.

So, this detail oriented logician had her feelings hurt. Perhaps they were hurt on a regular basis. Perhaps it wasn’t intentional, but occurred none-the-less.

It’s very factual. They were hurt.

So, she processes the hurt. Acknowledges the ebb and flow of a hurtful comment on a Monday. Starts to heal on Tuesday. Regresses (a little) on Wednesday. Calls in sick on Thursday. And so on, until the hurt has become a freckle, a slightly noticed mar of skin. A beauty mark, perhaps. A near-distant ache.

She does this for years. It’s a process she’s very aware of. Sometimes she schedules time to cry. Sometimes the tears are impromptu.

I know this girl well. She’s 30, I’m 30. We both like green-tea ice-cream. Tofu and beef fried rice. We co-reside at the edge of blemished reason and plausible absurdity. We are, by all accounts: ridiculously flawed in our logic, and not, at the same time.

So, the concreteness of it is this:

I don’t believe there is a finite reservoir of strength/resilience or whatever internal gunk that you pull from when you are hurt and need to heal. I don’t believe that all can, or should, be forgiven when you have been injured. I don’t believe that it shouldn’t happen either. I don’t believe in blanket layered statements, though sometimes, the rhetoric does soothe and calm and nourish the soul that doesn’t want true answers. I don’t believe that saying what I just said about souls and true answers is a judgment call. I believe all of our souls want to be calmed.

But I know my soul. And I can forgive what I want to forgive. And I probably could forget, if I wanted to, or was made for it: but I don’t. And personally, which is all I feel like speaking from at this point in the day: that’s ok.

I don’t blame my mom for our reality, though I wish, if I one-day get married, she could speak about times we’ve never been gifted. She can’t. We won’t. We didn’t.

I don’t carry an anger, now, for the disappointments. For the worse-than-thats. And there was worse-than-thats.

I don’t have the same openness for everyone. I don’t have a full unforgiving heart. I want to say sorry, but I can’t. It wouldn’t be true. I am a bias machine sometimes.

I don’t believe it will align me with a life of sadness. I could be wrong. I tend to be at least a quarter of the time.

It’s very human. I forgive me for that. But I needn’t forgive everybody.
True story.