Forgiveness

I turned 30 years old today.

A milestone such as this makes me reflect upon my life, where I am and where I'm headed. What have I learned thus far? What kind of ideas, habits, things should I leave behind in my twenties?

Last night I went to see the movie "Eat, Pray, Love," based on the book by Elizabeth Gilbert. I've read it twice, as well as the sequel ("Committed"), so not surprisingly I enjoyed the movie as well. But there was a part I had forgotten about in the book, a particularly emotionally intense scene about forgiveness that I found rough to watch.

I tend to be a pretty forgiving person and have heard a lot about the powers of forgiving others. I'll never forget a Joyce Meyers sermon I saw once on forgiveness. She said that we carry those we haven't forgiven around on our backs every day of our lives. Until we learn to forgive them, we walk through life hunched over, lugging around the incredible weight of that resentment. We'll never stand tall and get where we want to go until we release them. I find that to be true and work hard to forgive people who have hurt me.

But an even trickier psychological feat is learning how to forgive ourselves. Some people carry the luggage of their own mistakes around for far too long. You can tell the first time you meet them -  shoulders hunched, eyes cast downward...tired faces showing the pain of their struggles.

I don't want to become that person. In fact it's very important to me that I don't become that person, and that is what I've realized on this 30th birthday. I've been through a lot in the past couple of years, but it's time to stop carrying the weight of the two people I haven't forgiven; myself and my ex-husband.

It's time to forgive him - the person I spent nearly ten years of my life with. And it's time to forgive myself for whatever part I may have played that could have contributed to the end of our marriage.

The emotionally wrenching part of Eat, Pray, Love was where a man at an Indian Ashram talks of his struggles to forgive himself for his alcoholic past, as he assists Gilbert (the author) in working to forgive herself. Gilbert sits on the roof of an Indian Ashram, meditating about forgiveness and in the meantime picturing the happy days of her marriage, before her messy divorce. Except she changes the memories. She pictures herself in her wedding dress dancing with her ex-husband, who talks to her kindly about the divorce as if they were friends. And through this she gains forgiveness for herself.

Watching this I realized it's time for me to stop picturing that wedding dance and feeling horrible about it, even when the song plays on the radio. It's time to stop having flashbacks to good memories that hurt; like those ten days stumbling around small towns in Mexico with no plans and broken Spanish...dance parties by ourselves at home late at night.....our off-the trail hikes through thick woods and creeks with the dog, the way we'd make fun of the crazy people they interview on the local news, flying kites on the beach, the awesome halloween costumes we'd come up with every year....etc. etc.

It's time to delete the late night message he left on my phone when he was on vacation, rambling for five minutes about how much he adores me and is so in love with me and is so lucky to be my husband. The message I keep saving because I can't seem to let it go...because it's proof that I wasn't crazy, he was someone else when I married him.


And it's time to stop picturing the bad memories, after he became someone I didn't know, the horrifying things he said to me. The horrifying things he admitted to. It's time for these random memories of the last ten years of my life to stop popping into my subconscious at unexpected, heart-stopping moments like in the middle of a work meeting or at a barbecue with married friends. Memories so harsh and biting they make you want to crawl in a hole and fall to pieces at the same time. The kind of pain that can sour even the best of days.

It's time to stop kicking myself over and over again for all of it - not to make any of it disappear but embracing it with warmth and letting the pain go. It's time for forgivenesss - the one thing I've been avoiding because it hurts so much just to think of trying to do it. Because I hadn't quite worked through my feelings yet to get there.

But if I need a nudge, it's now, it's here. I know I will do whatever it takes, prayer, changing memories, even crawl to the top of an Ashram in India like Gilbert and meditate there until I've found my forgiveness. But it needs to happen. Because this is a new decade for me and I will not carry him into my 30's. And I'm not going to treat myself with anything but kindness here on out. That I owe to myself.

Today I will ask myself for forgiveness. I will pray for the strength to forgive him. Resentment and guilt are like cancers that grow if we feed them.

Today I vow to stop feeding them, the best birthday gift I can give myself.