[24/30] Learning to Forgive

One of the things you learn as you grow up is just how delicate trust is. It’s easy to give, but once it’s broken, it sours everything.

Most of us know this with people but it applies to yourself too. In fact, maintaining trust with yourself is even harder. Screw something up once and your friend may let it go but your conscience? Oof, good luck with that. Talk about a constant reminder.

It might even start affecting your judgement. The next time you're in the same situation, you might hear that little inner voice that says "you messed this up last time, who are you to do it again?" and you freeze up. Which just leads you on a downward spiral. I definitely feel this with driving.

The answer, it seems, is as cheesy as it sounds. Forgiveness. It means forgiving yourself for past mistakes. It's to get up and move on because, really, what's the alternative? You can't stay here forever.

You can't run away from a broken trust with yourself. If someone else did it, you can cut them off. But you can't do that with yourself. You can try to shut parts of you away, but that’s just living with the world tiptoeing around you. And can you really call that living?

Self-forgiveness is one of the biggest lessons over the past decade. I've learned to trust myself even after mistakes and the shame comes along with it. It's to trust that I can deliver on scary, hard things even if there's a chance I'll mess up again. You know, to do the hard things more often.

Oddly enough, the more mistakes I’ve made and pushed through, the more confident I’ve become that whatever life throws at me, I can figure it out.

All this self-forgiveness though, doesn't make failure any less scary. I still cower sometimes. But it does mean that I can use my past to give me some courage to tackle these problems.

It's still scary, but I'm more willing to face it head-on because again, really, what other choice is there but forward ?