To Forgive Myself
To Forgive Myself
My mistakes make me who I am and I’m proud to be Me!
Today, courageously, I’m going to try to answer a big question of mine, because I couldn’t help myself after I had a chat with a friend. After all, it’s all because of my friends 🙂 thank you all guys!
Why forgiving ourselves is the most difficult?
First of all, I want to say that I will have many questions about “forgiveness” in the future and I will try to answer them from time to time because this is a topic that I have had/will have to defend my opinion over and over for many years against many people. Rather, it’s something people try hard on me to change my mind. It’s the same situation when some very faithful people try too hard to convince their beloved ones who have little faith or no faith at all, that their faith is actually the way of salvation. This is, in fact, a very innocent effort, because the believers believe that their “non – believer” beloved ones will go to hell, so they naively try to save their souls from the future flames of hell. That’s exactly my position with my opinion on “forgiveness”. Many of my beloved ones try to attract me to the side of forgivers because probably I will reach Nirvana or something like that when I start forgiving, or I might be a better person, or I will be freed of my burdens, and yet none of them succeeded in convincing me. Anyway, as I said, I’ll come back to this later. Now I’m gonna go back to my question, even better to my questions. Why do we push ourselves so hard? Why do we hurt ourselves the most? Why don’t we let ourselves to make mistakes? Why do we stand so tough and hardly forgive ourselves for the slightest mistake? When I take a quick look at my daily life in general, I know that even the busiest days cannot save me from a one to one chat with myself. Even if not during the day, when it’s time for bed and I lay down into my bed, here we go, “Hello myself” and we start evaluating the day. We do this involuntarily because I have this need to improve myself, I need to be the perfect version of myself. These evaluations are about everything; my job, relationships, behaviours, daily chats, attitudes etc… For example every workday on my way home I review what I did at work that day and complete some kind of a check list; did I send this, did I remind that task or did I do that? If I come to a detail that I skipped I’m in real trouble, this will haunt me even in my sleep till I complete it the very next day. Let’s just say I’ve made a little mistake, I’ve missed or overlooked, or worse I’ve simply forgotten; and here again: How do I do it, what an idiot am I, how can’t I realize something like that? I’m amazed at how hard I can be to myself and how long it can go on. I’ll even colour it with one example; once I forgot a very long holiday period of some foreign suppliers and skipped the quotations which usually take a week when I realized what happened I directly went to my superior and told her that I’m ready to get fired because I forgot to do the quotations. My manager said she had the same responsibility and she forgets to ask me to prepare them. So we both did the same mistake. At the end, I was told to go back to my seat. I also evaluate a simple conversation with a friend, a family member, or even with an acquaintance. The questions are slightly different but always an evaluation; was it better if I just didn’t say this, or did I ever say that, etc? I go on with considering and reconsidering a very simple chat for all day, which can become a nightmare if I find something that I think I shouldn’t have said. I don’t want to think about some mistake I did against my child. Didn’t I ever? Of course, I did dozens. Damn you, woman! What kind of a mother are you? I keep yelling at myself and metaphorically I hit my head on the walls for days. If I can, I could just kick myself to the moon and yet I’m not a violent person. It could take years to forgive myself about what I’ve done. Let’s say I’ve involuntarily broken someone’s heart, here again, me hitting my head through the walls.
I often think if also other people are overthinking their daily actions so thoroughly as I am. Let’s say they’re not, what difference will it make for me, I’m what I am, so this is an ineffective comparison for me. Then a friend comes out of a conversation on such a topic and I realize that there are actually others like me and even close people to me. I feel a little better and I say I’m not the only crazy one around here.
While I punish myself for some ridiculous nonsensical details, my subconscious does way worse. Sometimes I just see punishing myself so obviously but unconsciously and sooner or later I realize that is actually my subconscious giving me very good lessons. For example, I find myself saying, ”Yes, I’ll be very sorry if I do that, but I am just not able to make it otherwise even it’ll be less harmful”, so push myself for the most hurtful way. Why my friend? Why am I hurting myself? Why not choose a less harmful way? It’s simple because I somehow deserved it because I put myself in this situation, it’s all because of me. It’s nobody else’s fault, so you get what you deserved. Simply I don’t know the reason why but I found myself in an unpleasant situation, so I just automatically punish myself for it.
Still, I’m still not getting the point, so I need to question myself a bit harder. And I come to the key question. Am I not a human? A normal standard person? Do I have no right to make mistakes, intentionally or unintentionally, or am I not allowed to make mistakes? Is this a luxury? Here I see a rose standing before me with its spines, yet I still want to reach it and take it through to my nose and fill my lungs with the nice scent of it. Yeah, maybe there is a price of it, but I’m willing to pay for it and I choose not to deprive myself of that fragrance. While I take the rose my finger start bleeding and I feel the pain. So do I need to hurt myself more because I caused a pain; like, do I have to pierce myself with more spines? But this was my decisions and I intentionally chose it regardless of the consequences. Do I have to be punished? It’s nonsense, isn’t it?
Well, not every mistake or pain is experienced intentionally. What do I tell about the ones I make unintentionally? I’m going to say the sole truth and I’ll simply admit: Yes, I’m a human, and unfortunately not a super-hero. I accept that not everything is under my control. But there are things under my control, so I carefully take my steps by considering the consequences. I am allowed to make mistakes while I try to shape my life, but I have to make sure that there are no irreversible ones. If I add these mistakes to my existence, I learn from them and if I do not repeat them again, it means I have continued to develop myself by making this mistake. All these mistakes made me who I am, made me a friend, made me a wife, made me a mother. Wouldn’t it make sense to try to be a better version of myself; a better friend, employee, wife, child, parent by learning from them instead of punishing myself for doing them? Then I can go back to my previous article. If my best friend is Me and if I’m a human, sometimes I know I can make intentional or unintentional mistakes. The important thing is to learn from them and make sure that I will not repeat it again and to forgive myself. I’m proud to be me. Let’s just forget the others and start with forgiving ourselves.
