Forgiveness Is a Scary Word

Content Warning: This piece is a follow up to two other pieces, the first of which can be found here and the second of which can be found here. This piece, like the first two, contains curse words and discussions and descriptions of physical and psychological abuse and neglect of a child.

I also want to make something very clear: My choice (and anyone’s choice) to forgive, or not forgive, is a morally neutral choice. It is a choice that I make entirely for myself, not for anyone else. No one (and I mean no one) gets to tell another person, especially a survivor of violent abuse, how they approach the topic of forgiveness. Some people will never forgive, and that’s the most healing thing for them, and some people are the opposite, and swear by forgiveness as a way to heal. And it’s all fine and valid and cool, and we need to stop assigning moral value and “right/wrong” to how people cope with their abuse and trauma. They survived. They win. No one gets a say in how they feel about it all.

Every summer for more than a decade I’ve spent at least a week (and in recent years closer to a month) in the Texas Hill Country, at a summer camp that has come to feel more like home to me than just about anywhere else. The camp is Unitarian Universalist, and closely tied to the UU church in Austin that my mom attended as a youth and that I credit with making me much of who I am today. A unique piece of camp that exists only because we are Unitarian Universalist is that we start every week with building a Covenant. Covenant is truly what makes Unitarian Universalist communities so special. Covenant is a noun- a list of things, written down and signed, we have all agreed to adhere to during our time together, and it is a verb- meaning to promise to engage with each other, our physical world, ourselves, and our faith in certain ways. Historically, the Covenants we build at our youth camps look pretty similar to each other. They usually include things like “respect,” “practice patience,” and a camp favorite “situational awareness.” Each week we also build a Covenant as staff, and it often looks quite similar to the camper’s Covenant, with the typical additions of “ask for help,” “practice self care,” and “center the youth.”

This past camp season, while building the Staff Covenant for our third week of camp, another adult staff member suggested adding “forgiveness” to the list of things we would work towards that week. When they said this my immediate (internal) response was “oh hell no.” The staff member quickly followed up with an explanation that choosing forgiveness does not mean you’re excusing someone’s behavior, just that you’re choosing it for yourself, and not holding onto their actions. And as wonderful and cutesy and therapy sounding their words were, I still felt my throat tighten up and a pit form in my stomach.

I’ve hated the word forgiveness for years. As a child, after a particularly rough day at the hands of my abuser, she would give me a hug, and tell me that she forgave me for the way I had behaved that day.

“I forgive you.” She would say, “I won’t hold this against you. Our relationship is the most important thing to me. We will try tomorrow. I forgive you.”

At the time, I struggled to understand what she meant when she said that. Now I know that it was all part of the way she made what she was doing to be my fault, and made me feel like I was doing something wrong- that I had something I needed to be forgiven for.

Just as often as she would wrap me up in her cold embrace at the end of the day and promise she forgave me, she would keep me inside at recess and scream at me that whatever I’d done most recently might not be deserving of forgiveness. She’d ignored my raised hand in class, so I spoke out of turn to ask to use the bathroom, and that was unacceptable. I’d gotten up from an activity without asking to get my inhaler from my backpack while I was in the middle of a coughing fit, and that was disruptive. I’d laughed too much or spoken too loud or not finished all the food in my lunchbox or not smiled at her when I walked in the classroom in the morning or my clothes were too loose or to long or looked too much like what I wore yesterday or a whole host of other egregious offenses, and I didn’t deserve her forgiveness she would say, often yelling. And eventually she’d break me down and I would cry, and beg her for forgiveness and to let me go outside with my friends, and I think she liked it when I begged, and after I begged an acceptable amount, she would grant me forgiveness, or at least the promise that she’d consider it, and I would breathe a sigh of relief and promise myself and her I would be better and not act out again because really how stupid could I be? What fucking moron 5th grader just goes and gets their inhaler? I should have known better. And now I knew better. And the cycle would start again the next day.

My disdain for the word forgiveness came from other places at the school too. When I first tried to tell someone what was happening to me, they told me I needed to “forgive and forget.” The second time I tried to ask for help the same person told me I had been forgiven so many times, I should extend the same kindness to my teacher. We’re all human after all, aren’t we? There was not a third time asking that person for help.

And then I left the school, and the abuse ended. And eventually I got into therapy, where I started to hear some of the same messages about forgiveness that I’d heard while being actively abused.

“Have you ever thought about forgiving her, so you can move on?”

“Forgiveness can be healing you know, you can’t hold a grudge forever!”

“Without forgiving her, you’ll never be able to be get over it.”

And then I found a therapist who for the first time in my life told me that was bullshit, and that I didn’t have to forgive her, or the people who let it happen, or anyone else for anything. Her telling me what felt like a wonderful, beautiful, much needed breath of fresh air. And so I said screw it and I swore off forgiveness. I told myself and other people that no matter what, I would never forgive her. She didn’t deserve my forgiveness, and neither did anyone else, and they, right along with anyone who’d ever pressured me to forgive them, could go fuck themselves.

And then at camp this year, a staff member who I’ve known for years, and come to respect, look up to, and love, suggested putting forgiveness on the Covenant. My brain was screaming, and I couldn’t see straight as everyone around me nodded and the words were written down (it should be noted that this is generally not good practice while building a Covenant, and you should advocate for yourself for the wording to be changed if it makes you as uncomfortable as I was). I chose to stay quiet, and I told myself that it was fine, and that the community around me would never ask me to forgive what had happened to me as a child, and that this situation was completely different. I told myself this staff member meant forgiveness in lighter situations, and that they probably weren’t even thinking about the type of thing that I’d been through. There was just no way that’s the kind of thing they were thinking about, right?

A day or two later, once the week of camp had officially started, the topic of forgiveness came up again with me and the staff member who had originally suggested it. I told them that I almost asked for the wording to be different on the Covenant, and I shared that the term had been used as a weapon in the past. I remember expecting them to essentially tell me what I’d told myself during staff meeting- “Oh well, I’d never suggest you forgive that person for what she did to you.” I expected to be told that forgiveness was something that should be brought out when someone slept through their alarm in the morning, or forgot they agreed to help out with a certain activity, or snapped at you because they were tired and hungry and worn out from the heat. Instead though, the other staff member listened to me, validated what I had said, and then shared some of their own story- story that resonated with me and had veins of similarity with my own story, story of how they were hurt in horrendous and painful ways, and story of how they were choosing forgiveness anyways.

In that moment, something shifted in my brain. Well really in that moment I thought “god fucking dammit if this person isn’t going to agree with me that forgiveness is horse shit and I don’t have to even think about it, and if this person can choose to forgive, than maybe it’s a word I at least shouldn’t be so scared of.” And then eventually as I played around with the idea in my head over the next few days, something started to shift in my brain.

All this wonderful shifting and talking and considering aside, I am not ready to forgive my abuser for what she did to me. I am not ready to forgive the people who I told while it was happening and did nothing. I am not ready to forgive the people who looked me in the eyes at 11 years old and told me I was lying. I am not ready to forgive the people who continue to defend her to me, or the people who still don’t believe me when I talk about the things she did. I am not ready to forgive the people who want me to be quiet and act like it didn’t happen. I am not ready to forgive the people who are still connected with her on social media, or the people who talk about what happened with me and her and put even the smallest amount of blame on me. I am not ready to forgive any of them, for any of it.

Or rather, I am not ready to use the word “forgiveness” when it comes to her, or any of the things that happened at that school. And because of the nature of that word for me, and how closely it’s tied to the abuse, I may never be ready to use it when it comes to everything that happened back then.

But I am ready to not be actively angry at her, all of the time. I am ready to not walk around hating the people who knew how much pain I was in and chose to ignore it, no matter how much their actions hurt. I am ready to wrap my anger and my hurt up, and put them in a jar, and put that jar on a shelf in the back of my brain. I know that it’s there, if I ever want or need to feel those feelings again (which I certainly will), and I know that no matter what I do, it’s unlikely that jar will ever be empty. She, and all the people who enabled and participated in the abuse, caused little kid me too much pain for the anger and the hurt to ever really go away, but that doesn’t mean that I have to feel them every single second of every single day.

And, I am ready to use the word forgiveness in other contexts. I am ready for it to be on the Covenant again if someone suggests it, and I am ready to use it with other things in my life outside of camp. Most of all, I’m ready to not be scared of the word.

I am not ready to forgive her (yet).

And to the staff member who brought all this up, Tavis,- Thank you for choosing to forgive, and thank you for teaching me to add yet to the end of that last sentence.