To Forgive, or Not to Forgive

If I have done my job then you know that I am prone to being completely self-absorbed.  Over the years I have found that it is a common trait that, for many people, persists into adulthood.  But that doesn’t make it any less of a letdown when one recognizes the douchebag in the mirror. 

 It’s not as if I wake up every morning and recite a mantra of, “I don’t give a shit about anyone but myself.  It’s all about me, me, me” as I’m pouring my coffee.  And yet it’s there.  And part of that selfishness has been writing this blog without regard to the effect it might have on those involved.  

For most things I make no excuses: this blog is a soapbox for my teen angst.  After all, isn’t the simple act of writing a blog the very pinnacle of self-important mental masturbation?  I have bitched about the injustices done to me a long, long time ago in an effort to understand how those injustices have shaped my current worldview. I have also tried to show that I am a deeply flawed human being who has imagined herself as much more artistic, intelligent, witty, and overall super fantastic than she really is.  (Though I secretly still consider myself super fantastic.) 

Last week I posted a blog with a couple of journal excerpts and a couple of poems.  Like most of my other excerpts these do not detail a time of sunshine and rainbows.  They are painful to read.  It’s painful to know the dark place that they came from, painful to know that the things mentioned actually happened.  They no longer affect me in a negative way so I never even considered how they might affect others.

I am writng this to analyze myself and my responses to the stimuli of the times.  I am writing this to look at that person I used to be and know without a doubt that that could never happen to me again, that I could never be that person again.  Yes, I’ve discussed some serious shit on here and even gave a guided tour of my own kick-ass mental breakdown. (For the record, it wasn’t kick-ass; it actually kinda sucked.)  But there are some things that I can look back on and though they were painful at the time they cannot touch me the way that they used to.

 And there is a reason for that.

 Forgiveness.

 I have recently realized that beneath all of the snark this blog is about forgiveness.  (I never said I was a quick study.)  I know that my experience is not unique but it was my experience.  And there are a lot of things that happened that, as I poke fun of myself and my reactions, have some people scratching their heads.

 As I highlight sections of my high school experience I can only guess at the motives and backgrounds of the other characters in my play.  And even those times where I know the motives I cannot go into specifics because those aren’t my stories to tell.  Suffice to say that the knowledge I am privy to has allowed me to look back with a measure of pragmatism on events that, at the time, were earth shattering.  I am not here to talk about other people.  I am here to talk about myself.  I am here to perform tricks and make jokes and laugh at the live-or-die mentality of my teenage mind.

 Over the years I have forgiven much.  There are some things I forgave almost instantly because I knew that there were other forces at work, that the perpetrator had reasons for his or her cruelty.  There are some things that took a couple of years to heal because the wound was so deep.  And there are some things that have yet to heal completely and every now and then I scrape off the scab just to get a peek of how far along the healing process has come.  A lot of this forgiveness has been aimed at myself for being such a brat, for being so selfish, for not seeing things I should have seen, for not being there when I should have been there, for allowing my own petty shit to overshadow the decidedly un-petty shit my friends were going through.  I was not a very good person.  I was not a good friend.  I was kind of an all-around douchebag.  Of course, teenagers are pretty much all-around douchebags so it’s not like I stood out. 

 But to those of you who cut me the deepest, those who wounded my spirit, I have come to a place of relative peace.  (Let’s all “ohm” together now, shall we?)  The scabs are shrinking; some have already become scars, and those that haven’t don’t get picked as often anymore.  I don’t want to make myself bleed.  And I don’t want to make anyone else bleed anymore, either.  The words that I wrote when I was “in the shit”, as they say, are the words of a confused teenager, and if they cause anyone pain I am sorry.  But I will not edit what I write here.  This is, and always has been, about self-absorbed little douchebag me and to change that would be a disservice to myself. 

 As I continue I hope that I can offer myself the same measure of forgiveness that I offer to those who have been referenced here.  It pretty much sucks to see yourself through honest eyes, to finally recognize the douchebag within.  To forgive myself for that self-important douchebaggery is even more difficult.  But I think I’ll get there eventually.

~ by selifinos on August 2, 2011.