Ever heard the saying, “To forgive is to set the prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you?” 

Or how about this one? “Forgiveness means letting go of all hopes for a better past.” 

Have you ever had to forgive someone who perhaps never even apologized?  

I have and it was not easy, but I have learned the hard way that yes, in some cases we are forgiving others that may have done us wrong and they admit that and want to continue building a friendship/relationship and putting in the work that those things require. But sometimes, you have to forgive people for yourself and that does not always come with an apology.

We all want to feel like we are in the right, and we all want to feel like we have gotten some kind of closure in certain situations, but sometimes holding out for those things really is just a form of self-torture. In essence, we are giving away our power. We are letting other people, the outside world and bad situations influence our emotional, mental and even physical well-being.  

I have discovered that fully acknowledging I have found myself in a less than great situation helps. Sometimes we want to glaze over how those hurtful things, well…hurt us. I am guilty of this. It is kind of my expertise or, so I have been told. I have been called “cold” on more than one occasion and I can’t say that they are wrong. I have previously called it my “survival mechanism.” If something happens that is not ideal or if someone does me wrong, I will just kind of act like it didn’t happen or it didn’t bother me. But then I am doing just that – surviving. When I really should be thriving. 

Instead of going into survival mode, I have started to try and really delve into those emotions and pinpoint all of them. In some cases, it may be a minor offense and I can handle that fairly quickly but, in some cases, it may be a major event. These usually take a little longer to work through but it’s an essential part of the process.  

What made me come to this realization? Well, honestly, I have had a lot going on at one time, everything around me simultaneously deciding to combust all at once. For a while I was getting by just laughing it off, acting like it was no big deal and that these things did not have any type of hold on me.  

A couple months of this act… and one night, all those emotions I had been holding back just randomly hit me like a freight train. It was absolutely nauseating and then I began to feel overwhelmed by all these things and trying to work through them all at once. Within one moment of letting my guard down, I was inundated with months, possibly years of things that I have been avoiding while I was in survival mode.  

I realized very quickly that holding back those emotions – the guilt, hurt, sadness, anger, while also holding on to grudges and waiting for resolutions outside of myself, I wasn’t surviving in any way. I was just delaying the inevitable. I needed to stop pretending things were okay and just live in the unokayness for a while in order to work through it.

The feeling of closure, being vindicated, or the act of forgiveness cannot always depend on the outside world and those that encompass it. We must rely on ourselves and our self-acknowledgement for our own happiness.  

I will end with one more quote. “Letting go gives us freedom and freedom is the only condition for happiness.” – Thich Nhat Hanh

(Paige Nash is a mother of three girls, publisher of Bienville Parish Journal and Claiborne Parish Journal and a digital journalist for Webster Parish Journal.)