I forgive you.
We’ve all heard it. We’ve all said it. Sometimes we mean it, sometimes we don’t, and sometimes we say it because it feels easier than admitting we’re still hurt. Forgiveness is one of those things we’re taught to treat like a simple equation: someone hurts you, they apologize, you forgive them, and everyone lives happily ever after. Cue the credits.
Except real life doesn’t really work that way.
Sometimes the apology never comes. Sometimes the person who hurt you doesn’t even realize they did. Sometimes you forgive someone because you want them back in your life, and sometimes you forgive them because you finally realize you don’t want them there anymore.
There are people we forgive because we love them, people we forgive because we’re tired of being angry, and people we forgive simply because carrying the weight of what happened has become heavier than putting it down.
For a long time, I think I confused forgiveness with wanting things to go back to normal. I have never been particularly fond of conflict, so there was something comforting about forgiveness when I thought it meant the uncomfortable part could finally be over. Maybe if I forgave someone, we could stop being angry. Maybe we could stop talking around the problem. Maybe we could go back to laughing like nothing happened.
But sometimes, the way things were isn’t somewhere you should go back to.
I thought forgiveness had to come with forgetting, too. Forgive and forget. Nice little phrase, except I have never been good at executing the second part. I remember. I remember conversations, little moments, things people probably don’t even realize stayed with me. I remember what made me trust someone less. I remember what made me realize I needed to leave. I remember the apologies I waited for that never came.
For a while, I thought remembering meant that I hadn’t truly forgiven. Now, I think remembering can be part of forgiveness.
You can forgive someone and still learn from what happened. You can understand that someone’s intentions weren’t necessarily malicious and still admit that their actions hurt you. You can accept that people make mistakes without volunteering to be hurt by the same mistake twice. You can forgive someone and still let them go.
There is something strangely freeing about realizing that forgiveness does not require reconciliation. Sometimes it means having one last conversation. Sometimes it means walking away. Sometimes it means wishing someone well from a distance and deciding that your life feels lighter without them in it.
Maybe that’s why forgiveness is so difficult. We want it to have rules. We want a beginning, a middle, and a neat little ending where everyone understands each other and nobody has any lingering questions.
Unfortunately, we do not live in a romantic comedy. Or maybe we do, just without the two-hour runtime. Because eventually, the story has to turn inward.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about the people I needed to forgive. The people who hurt me, the people who left, the people who made mistakes, and even the people who never realized they had anything to apologize for. But somewhere along the way, I realized I had been leaving someone out of the conversation.
Me.
I have been much more willing to give other people room to be human than I have been willing to give myself that same room. I can understand why someone made a mistake. I can accept that they didn’t always know better. I can even believe that something can hurt without someone intending to cause harm.
So why shouldn’t I be allowed the same grace?
Forgiving yourself doesn’t mean deciding that every choice you made was the right one. It doesn’t mean ignoring the times you could have done better, or pretending you didn’t learn something the hard way. It just means you don’t have to keep living inside the worst version of a decision you’ve already made.
There are parts of myself I am still learning to be softer with: the girl who didn’t always speak up, the girl who sometimes made herself smaller for other people, and even the girl who didn’t always recognize her own worth until someone else reminded her of it.
I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being angry at her for not knowing what I know now.
She was figuring it out, too.
That’s the kind of forgiveness I want to practice now. Not forgetting. Not excusing. Not going back to something just because I miss it. Just letting myself move forward without needing to carry every old version of me along for the ride.
I can remember what happened without letting it define me. I can forgive people without giving them another chance to hurt me. And, finally, I can forgive myself without needing a perfect reason to deserve it.
I don’t have to become someone entirely new to feel proud of who I am. Maybe I just have to stop being so hard on the girl who got me here.
I forgive you.
And for now, I think that’s enough. Not necessarily a happy ever after ending, but we can cue the credits anyways.