What this really means is not that I'm some bad ass tough guy, it means I'm lousy at forgiveness.
I remember being a kid listening to the preacher man in Sunday services telling us that God forgives all if we ask for it, thinking to myself that there's no way God excuses the murderers, rapists, child abusers. What kind of world is that? Do whatever you want but say, "oh man, I'm really sorry" and poof it's forgiven? Yeah. No way.
People would say holding onto resentment or not giving grace in the face of mistakes, only hurts you. Nope, the person hurt me and I would be stupid to let them do it again. It was slap in the face to my strong sense of justice and self preservation to excuse major flaws in others.
Wastefully I torched people out of my life, brazenly assuming that there would be more after them. More friends, better relationships, there was always more out there. I literally ran away from home when I couldn't get along with my own family when I was a teenager.
Over time my smartness began to get replaced by wisdom through perspective and experience while a few people held on to fire extinguishers and persisted even when I was headed the other way. Only very recently I've learned how to stand on the ashes of something and build again, sometimes even saving shreds of it before it was all gone.
I'm not interested in burning bridges anymore. The promise of more people that are trustworthy, more relationships that are meaningful, more special connections that only that person understands, is not given to us and it's worth it to hang on through the hard stuff because in reality we are all entwined somehow in life and need each other no matter how strong, independent, and self sufficient we'd like to seem. Kind of an awesome side effect of that is being able to forgive yourself for the stupid shit you have also done.
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| Horses are the quickest to forgive us even when we forget to apologize |
