The hardest part about healing isn’t always about grief or about acceptance. It’s forgiveness.
Forgiveness can feel like betrayal—not of the perpetrator, but of ourselves. It asks us to loosen our grip on the altar of pain we’ve built: every word spoken, every text message, every moment of anguish we preserved in our mind as proof that it happened and that it hurt.
But when we hold on too tightly, we end up speaking only to ghosts. We seek closure from people who have long since left. Our pain becomes a monument, and we fear that dismantling it will erase the truth of what we suffered.
Scars weave into our identity. We wonder: If they heal, who will I be? Will suffering lose its meaning?
There’s a strange sanctity in suffering. Like wearing mourning clothes long after the funeral, believing that continued aching honors the past. But healing teaches us that the most sacred way to honor what happened is to care for ourselves. In this way, we forgive the younger version of ourselves—for staying too long, trusting too deeply, not knowing how to protect our heart. And we begin to see the person who hurt us not as a villain, but as someone wounded. Their actions reflected their pain, not our worth.
In a world where hurting others is easier than facing our own brokenness, choosing empathy is radical. It’s healing. It’s release.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting. It means reclaiming our power. And in that reclamation, there is liberation.