First Step to Forgiveness

I work with a holistic health coach and this week, she suggested I pick a topic that I felt I had a lot to say about, and start writing consistently about it.

She named a few suggestions but the one that jumped out at me immediately was forgiveness.

“Forgiveness,” I said. “That’s the one.”

After my mother took her life, I slithered and wiggled around through life like a mud bug for a long time.

I wanted to be Anywhere Else By Inside of This Skin.

The thought of all the terrible things I’d said to my mother—the thought of of all the venom spewed in teenage angst, years before she died, the thought of all the times I’d lied to her, put her last in terms of plans. That, coupled with the fact that I’d chosen to step back over the last couple years of her mental illness—had opted out of being there in a sense—these things corroded my heart.

And I came to believe, in no conscious way but in a deeprooted, invisible way, I simply came to believe it that I was no good. That there was no goodness inside of me and that I was at the core no good.

Do you know what it’s like to feel no good?

That feeling of wanting to shake out of yourself like a robe, that feeling of wanting to obliterate all sentient thoughts and feelings by any means necessary so they can’t haunt you?

That is suffering. And for me, it came from my own self—the narratives I was writing in my head, the awful words that truth or lie, I was repeating to myself, quickly eroding my sense of self worth.

It took me a long time to recognize that I was missing forgiveness—that a lack of forgiving myself was the thing that was ruining my life.

I felt despair that there was no undoing the awful things I had done and said to my mother before she died. She was gone—her pulverized bones and flesh a part of the ocean we’d swirled her ashes in and her spirit Somewhere Else.

There was no second chance.

After a few years of this gray, heavy, dark despair—after a few years of mud crawling my way through life, of sinking like a stone—one day I finally wondered: Is this really what I’m committing to?

Hm.

This is a very long life.

Am I really going to spend it committed to misery, hating myself?

This feels…a little…like…no fun at all?

I recall I was on the Green line train in Boston, ascending from the underground Kenmore stop to Commonwealth Ave and suddenly there was light all around me.

Perhaps, I thought, I could try a different way.

And the path to forgiveness opened up, like a secret trail in a mess of brambles I hadn’t seen was there. And it was a very very long path but I had begun.