Forgiveness

I’ve always had an easier time forgiving other people than myself. That’s not to say, I don’t hold grudges; I do, sometimes horribly long for very petty things. However, I seem unable to forgive myself, the one person I know is flawed.

In my serious relationships, I’ve always overlooked everything that bothered me until it became overwhelming to the point of subconscious passive aggressiveness. Even still, I would say nothing was wrong and mean it, as if I refused to allow myself to see the fault in someone I cared about, like a loyal dog who doesn’t know any better each time it gets kicked. But people don’t want loyalty in relationships apparently; it’s the first to be admired but last to be desired.

My fault comes when that loyalty is rejected, and the other person breaks it off. Then it switches from “this person can do no wrong” to “this person can do no right” because I see the previous relationship as a sham, a lie, this person was not as loyal as I was, even when that loyalty was tainted by subversive refusal to acknowledge what was wrong. When it is all said and done, I’m the flaw that caused the relationship to sour.

Maybe that is at the heart of my refusal to forgive myself. I chose to be loyal when I shouldn’t have; I chose to make a decision based on limited information; I chose to sound more knowledgeable than I was, all because I didn’t know more until later.

By the end of the day, I’ll even know more making even this rant seem foolish, naïve and uninformed.

What never changes is that I know nothing. The world is too vast to know, let alone understand, everything. Just like everyone, I’m just winging it, making calls and decisions with just the little bit of flawed understanding I have at the moment. That’s all any of us can do, and while I forgive others for that, I beat myself over the head for doing the same.

Or is that a lie I tell myself? Do my actual actions and words expose me for the fraud that I am? I suspect the later to be true, even when my brain refuses to see this massive weakness in myself instead of the self-harm over far more petty weaknesses that should be forgiven.