The things we call forgiven

There are things we forgive because we have forgiven them.
And then there are things we forgive because we don’t know just yet what else to call and define what happened.

I’ve spent some time thinking about the difference since, for years, I believed I had forgiven something that happened a very long time ago. It was one of those incidents that divided my life into a before and an after.

There were three people involved, although I don’t think that I truly understood that properly at the time. There was me, someone I wanted and someone I believed would never willingly hurt me.

I was young.
Someone I loved had disappointed me and someone I trusted had participated in that disappointment.

Betrayal.
It’s such an ugly and loud word for something that can be so quiet.
There doesn’t have to be an argument and no door needs to be slammed. Nobody has to raise their voice because sometimes betrayal is simply the knowledge that two people knew something would hurt you and decided to proceed anyway,

Perhaps that’s what hurt the most.
Not only what happened, but the fact that there was a conversation I was not part of. A decision I was unaware of being made. A private little world in which my feelings existed somewhere outside of the room.

And then I was told, the same night.
I remember thinking that maybe the fact that I had been told meant that I could forgive. That perhaps forgiveness could start with honesty. And perhaps being told the truth after the fact made the betrayal somehow less severe.

I think I needed to believe that. As I said, I was young and sometimes, even as adults, we create explanations not because they are true, but because we need somewhere safe to put our pain. So I put mine in the past. I called it forgiven and I carried on. And for more than 20 years, I rarely questioned the word, until recently.

A conversation brought something back to the surface. Without any drama and no cinematic moment in which the past announced itself. It was ordinary in which we spoke about memory, about who we had been. About first impressions and old feelings and somehow, I found myself saying something I had not said out loud in many, many years.

That I had been hurt. And more than that, that I had been heartbroken.

I suddenly understood that I had spent years confusing I no longer want to punish you with I was never hurt by what you did. They are not the same thing and neither is saying that it was a long time ago. Time does not erase meaning, it merely changes our relationship with it. There are memories that stop hurting when touched and there are others that simply become quieter. Unfortunately, we mistake the quiet for healing because we no longer hear the wound speaking every day.

But perhaps healing is not always forgetting.
Maybe sometimes it’s finally being honest about what happened without needing the past to become present again.

I never needed an apology to arrive twenty years late and re-arrange history.
What I needed was to stop telling my younger self that I had forgiven something when I hadn’t. She was allowed to be hurt. To have loved someone and felt betrayed. She was allowed to have trusted someone deeply and discovered that that trust had not been mutual in a way she thought it was.

And she was allowed to carry that hurt without becoming bitter.

Truly, there is a strange freedom in that distinction. I can say now:

It happened and it hurt me.

Maybe that’s what forgiveness actually and eventually becomes with enough distance. Not absolution and/or permission, but the ability to look directly at something that once wounded you and no longer need to distort your own memory of it in order to move forward.

But some details are almost irrelevant now. They have softened over time, as details tend to do. Tragically, what remains in the peculiar shape of the feeling.

Some things do not need to be forgiven, simply just understood. Yes, it really was that painful and you were not imagining it. For me, this incident ruined my ability to trust. And you no longer have to pretend it didn’t matter. Nothing erased and nothing excused and then hopefully we can, without any doubt or question, leave it where it belongs. In the past.