You see, I couldn't bear the reality of having made a mistake, because I wasn't able to forgive myself. My only escape from the tormenting guilt were my attempts to minimize what I had done by finding reasons why maybe it wasn't that bad, maybe it would turn out to be a good thing after all, maybe it was just a misunderstanding that could somehow be excused, etc. Another calming method was weighing down the wrong I had done towards the other person with any wrongs they had done towards me. In some twisted way, having been mistreated or the prospect of being mistreated in the future became something I was glad for. It made us even and, therefore, helped me move on from what I had done. Until, of course, they went ahead and did something good for me or were kind towards me and just ruined everything all over again. When all else failed, there was always the beautiful comforting thought that I was merely a dot in this universe, not even, and that at the end of the day, nothing I said or did or thought really mattered.
But then this one time, I hurt someone really bad. I did something really unfair to him that I should not have done. I tried justifying it. I tried minimizing it. I tried remembering all the ways he had mistreated me and found none. I did the good old dot-therapy. Nothing worked. My big selfish act stared at me right in the face. It kept me awake at nights. It followed me around during the day. I even tried to punish myself in different ways to feel like I had paid the price and even that didn't help. There was only one way left to go about it. It was the big dreaded f-word. FORGIVENESS. I couldn't believe how desperate I had become that I was willing to resort to it.
I went up to him. I explained my reasons for what I had done. I told him how much I regretted it. I apologized. He listened and then looked at me and said, "I forgive you." I wanted to punch him. Wasn't he even going to TRY to contradict any of what I had said?
After that conversation, none of my guilt had left me. In fact, it had become worse because now my last shred of hope that the plaintiff would let me off the hook was destroyed. Butchered. So selfishly handled. I pictured how this one mistake was going to torture me for the next who-knows-how-many years, until I did something worse that would take over. I knew myself. I knew what was coming. All the years of pure torture that I had no escape from anymore. I felt so hopeless and horrible that I could've sat down right there on the street and cried.
But then I had this moment of epiphany. What if I actually did forgive myself and let it go? What if I made the choice to not think about it anymore? To not suffer when I couldn't change what had happened anyway?
It was there and then that for the first time in my life, I said to myself, "You know what? Yes, what I did was wrong. But I really don't want to spend the rest of my life suffering over it. The only way out of this is to just accept it and let it go." And I did! What I learned was that forgiving myself was a choice. It wasn't something that would naturally come to me; even if I sat down and waited, the guilt would never wear out on its own and disappear. I just literally had to decide to forgive myself and then refuse to think about it again when the thoughts came to me. To my relief, I found out that I wouldn't have to spend the rest of my life fighting those thoughts, because after I successfully ignored them for two or three times, they forgot about me for good.
I also learned that not being able to forgive myself is actually a form of pride. It literally means not being able to fit into my little brain how on earth I could have made a mistake. I mean, I am just so perfect. I don't get it. The reason knowing this helped me was because I used to think of forgiveness as something that was too good for me, something I didn't deserve. Like if I accepted it, it would mean that I considered myself more worthy than I actually was. Like I was placing myself higher than where I should have been; in other words, I was being proud. But it's actually quite the opposite; I would only be proud if I thought I was too good for forgiveness. Now, whenever the self-judgmental thoughts come to me, I just shrug and say, "Yeah, I made a mistake. I'm human. Big deal." I can almost see them growling at me in annoyance and walking away.
An idea that took me much longer to start believing in - even though I so desperately wanted to - was that my worth doesn't change because of my mistakes. I felt like if I hurt someone - sometimes even intentionally - it made me such a horrible person. Even small things like missing a deadline or judging someone in my mind or saying something stupid made me feel despicable. It got to a point where I couldn't even pinpoint what exactly made me feel that way; it was just me that was despicable. There is mostly no logic to guilt, but it can make you hate yourself in a way that you feel glad when people treat you like trash (I did my best to explain the "logic" behind it in the second paragraph). When you're in that place, even your desperate attempts at excuses can't make you feel any less despicable than you do. Thankfully, C.S. Lewis came to my rescue and wrote something about that in his book "The Weight of Glory":
"A great deal of our anxiety to make excuses comes from not really believing in [forgiveness], from thinking that God will not take us to Himself again unless He is satisfied that some sort of case can be made out in our favour. But that would not be forgiveness at all. Real forgiveness means looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its horror, dirt, meanness, and malice, and nevertheless being wholly reconciled to the man who has done it. That, and only that, is forgiveness, and that we can always have from God if we ask for it" (p. 180-181).
