So you know how people fuck you over again and again? And how sometimes there’s nothing you can do to stop it, but at least afterwards you can get high off your own anger and resentment? How everyone makes such a big deal about forgiving, but ultimately it can just feel so good to hold on to the hurt?

Damn it’s so sickeningly sweet. Saturating yourself in feelings of being “justified” and bathing in your puddles of pain and misery. It can be delicious. It can be addictive.

And in the end, it can be utterly useless and detrimental. Because holding onto to the pain damages exactly one person: you. Well maybe a couple of other people too if your hurt ends up happening all over everyone around you. It’s not like the person you’re angry at is affected by your pain. Even if you choose to exact some sort of revenge, the pain you cause them is just new pain, not a direct extension of your own. People can hurt other people, but everyone experiences hurt on their own and in their own way. Nothing you do will ever cause a person to “feel your pain” because it’s only yours.

That being said, hurting other people can have an impact on your own experience of your pain. Sometimes it makes it worse because you may feel guilty or ashamed, and sometimes it relieves it because you may get a sort of release from victimizing others.  It’s worth knowing that while strategies that cause further pain to others may allow for that short term release of your pain, they don’t resolve it, so the pain will just keep returning. Ultimately, everyone finds their own strategies for managing pain. The question is whether or not you will choose to seek out strategies that help you to deal with the hurt and truly move on. Because it is a choice to heal, and while not everyone chooses in their best interests, you can.

That is where the whole forgiveness thing comes in. Because at its heart, forgiving isn’t forgetting about what people do, or accepting what they do, or even understanding what they do. Forgiving is about finding ways to release your pain. It is when you look at another person, and realize that while you were not responsible for the hurt they caused, you get to choose whether or not you want to try to release it without causing any further harm to yourself or others. Forgiving is recognizing that while other people are responsible for the damage, you are still the one who has to deal with the mess, so you might as well clean it up in addition to whatever else you decide to do. Because you can forgive and still choose to dislike someone, or want to hurt someone, or to not understand someone, or to not accept someone.

So forgiveness is for your own sake. It’s for you to be able to heal, and so fuck whatever caused the pain in the first place. It doesn’t mean there are no scars. It doesn’t mean that you let go of everything and just forget about what happened. It does mean you get to find your own way of moving forward.