Why Forgiving Yourself Is Harder Than Forgiving Anyone Else

The rest of your life is ahead of you.

One of the first things that stopped me when I opened Forgiven was this thought from Matthew Kelly, whether you are 16 or 60, the rest of your life is ahead of you.

Think about that.

The rest of your life is ahead of you.

It sounds obvious, you know, of course it is, but how many of us are physically living in the present while emotionally living somewhere 20 or 30 years ago? Our bodies have moved on.

The calendar's moved on.

Everybody else may have moved on, but part of us is still standing in that old room.

Why? We're still replaying that argument, regretting that relationship, wishing we had said yes or wishing we had said no.

Still thinking, if I hadn't done that, if I had only known, if that hadn't happened, if I just made that choice.

Heather said something that stuck with me.

We spend so much of our time either in the past or in the future.

We ruminate about what happened or what we think happened and and then we jump ahead and create futures that haven't even happened yet so we're miserable about yesterday and we're worried about tomorrow while today is sitting here saying hello anybody home that made me think about the title of their book own what is let go of what isn't That does not mean pretending the past didn't happen.

This was something Charisse was very clear about.

Forgiveness is not an escape hatch from accountability.

We still own what we did.

We make amends when we can and recognize where we caused hurt.

We can learn and we can grow.

But Charisse brought up an important question.

When is enough enough? When have you taken responsibility? And when have you learned that lesson? When have you done what you reasonably can to repair something? When does accountability turn into a life sentence? Because there's a difference between saying, I did something I regret and saying, I am something regrettable.

Those are not the same sentence.

One describes an action, The other becomes an identity.

And I think a lot of us confuse the two.

We keep punishing today's version of ourselves for something yesterday's version of ourselves did.

And eventually we have to ask, how long is the sentence? Five years, 10, 30, forever.

At what point are we allowed to say, I own it.