S
Shaant
Guest
Balancing grace and growth in an imperfect journey.
Photo by Caner Sanli on Unsplash
When I think about forgiving myself, it never occurs all at once. It occurs in glimpses, like sunlight slipping through bumpy clouds, reminding me that I am more than the worst thing Iβve ever done, or the weakest moment Iβve ever had.
Yet still, some days it feels like I am dragging my shadow into every room before I arrive.
I have been ashamed for years regarding how long I stayed in a relationship that burned down every piece of me.
Nearly two years later, even the simplest reminders still stick to my chest like shards of glass.
Once, I was at a dinner with a mutual friend who nonchalantly used her name in casual conversation. My friend froze, realizing too late, and attempted to edge away in the conversation.
I stood up from the table, excused myself, and locked myself in the restaurant bathroom with my palms pressed down on the sink, my body shaking.
I wanted to pry the grief out of me. To vomit it up like poison. To not feel like I was reliving the same heartbreak again and again.
I walked back to the table empty.
He looked at me and said I had a thousand-yard stare.
I laughed but internally I was screaming.
I was angry at her, angry at myself, angry at the universe for continuing to orbit while I was on cement.
The hardest part is not that I loved her. It is that I still terrorize myself for how much of myself I lost in loving her.
Learning a new language also meant learning myself
I used to think that the proper words might save me. I became immersed in languages, first to survive and later out of sheer curiosity.
With moves into different countries, study abroad experiences, and finding myself at tables where no one shared the language I grew up with, I learned I could stretch thin across identities.
When I was in France for an on-site project, I realized that culture shock was not rooted in my fear of the strange. It was about letting go of the instinct that the unfamiliar meant wrong.
That tiny shift opened something in me.
I stopped having the audacity to believe that my way of life was the only way. I started to listen.
However, to listen outside me did not mean that I was great at listening inside. That is the contradiction that I still struggle with.
I can shift my tone, switch my dialect, slide between circles of people like water moving through cracks in stone.
But when it comes to merely sitting in quietude with myself, I am restless.
Solitude is too much like a mirror that shows me the pieces I want to flee from.
I have read that self-selected solitude can lead to self-acceptance and, ultimately, renewal.
Occasionally I experience that when I journal or walk alone and feel my own strength in my company.
Other times, solitude feels like punishment, as if the universe is reminding me of the void space that someone else used to occupy.
I am still trying to figure out how to tease apart healing solitude from devouring solitude.
What no one told me about responsibility and pain
One of the most difficult truths that I have tried to come to terms with is that no person is accountable for my feelings.
My therapist told me this one day, almost in passing, and I felt like I was going to detonate in her office.
How is it possible that this is true when someone elseβs decision has me feeling this way?
I fought with myself for weeks over this. If no one else is at fault, then it must be me. If no one else is culpable for my pain, then I must be the dumbass that let it happen.
I could barely stand that two-week mental loop.
But I am beginning to see this differently.
Responsibility is not the same as blame.
This therapist may not take any responsibility for the pain, and maybe she shouldnβt. I can choose to carry it differently.
I can figure out how to be a witness to my own suffering. The one person that does not turn away from it.
There is something freeing about this shift, even if it still feels fresh.
I do not have to force anyone to apologize to me. I do not have to imagine conversations that will never take place.
My work is to sit with my feelings long enough so they stop feeling like an enemy I have to outfight.
It doesnβt mean I donβt slide.
I still fantasize about her moving on. Still torment myself with pictures of her happy without me.
But in those moments I try to pause and ask: what part of me am I blaming right now? What part of me needs to be forgiven?
Grace is not a finish line
The reality is that healing happens in unexpected forms.
I used to believe there would be a day I woke up not thinking about her. Not a wince if someone said her city. Not a jolt if a song came through a cafΓ© that she loved.
Healing has been much more gradual and surprising.
Sometimes I donβt even see the progress until I look back.
I stopped checking her social media. I donβt give in to an urge when I want to spiral.
I fantasized about moments of confrontation and finally getting the apology I think I was owed.
I do not think about her like she is my solution to loneliness. I think about her, but, as is more often the case, I think about myself.
I am still learning to forgive him. The man who did not notice he was not noticing, because he was clinging. Who begged instead of leaving. Who thought love meant pain.
I think I forgive him.
I have made peace with the fact that forgiveness is practice, not a destination.
I know on some days I fill the space in my heart with grace. And that on other days, I go back to my own stories of failure and shame.
And yet in those moments I also saw something else show up this time. Resilience.
Because every time I forgive myself for falling short, I am building a kind of strength no one can take from me.
The only way forward is softer
When I zoom out, I can see how all of these decisions connect, and I can recognize how I am becoming more compassionate.
Learning new languages has provided empathy for others. Solitude taught me how to listen to the quiet inside myself. Grief taught me that time cannot erase your wounds, but that it can soften them. Therapy taught me that I can only own my actions, so I should be taking responsibility for doing something with them.
And together they have been teaching me that forgiveness is not erasing what occurred. Itβs permitting myself to live anyway.
I once believed that I was only allowed to experience peace once I was perfect.
Now, Iβve learned that grace is the only way forward. Not the loud grace of radical change, but the quiet grace of small and steady choices.
Forgiveness isnβt about her. It isnβt about the past, or the people who have hurt me.
It is about making a choice to stop making myself the enemy every single day.
And that is a piece of myself that Iβm still learning to forgive.
The Parts of Me Iβm Still Learning to Forgive was originally published in Mystic Minds on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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