Thinking by typing...

Forgiveness is tricky.  In some ways, it’s the simplest thing in the world.  I can choose to forgive someone and it’s done.  Until I find myself mad about the same thing again and I have to repeat the process.  Sometimes over and over.  (I am not a very good person; maybe other people don’t have this problem.)

It doesn’t matter if the person I forgive is sorry.  It doesn’t matter if people have changed.  It doesn’t even matter if they know they’ve wronged me.  I need to forgive because that’s where healing starts for me.  Selfish, perhaps, but true.  I don’t want to be the person that I become when I refuse to forgive.

The trouble is that forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation.  I can’t do reconciliation all by myself.  Forgiveness might be a step on the road, but reconciliation requires some traffic in both directions.  And there’s no damn map.

I hate unresolved issues.  They’re the “shave and a haircut” that makes me tap back “two bits.”  I want life’s screenwriters to tidy up the endings, preferably within this episode, not as an arc over the season.  They are not with my program.  Life is long enough that there are lots of possible complications and short enough that I feel some urgency about making peace.  I often don’t know what to do.

The Depression Monster that lives in my head tells me I’m going to screw up whatever I do.  It also tells me that I deserve whatever bad things happen because of my screw ups.  As far as it is concerned, every bad thing that has ever happened in my life is the direct result of me being a worthless piece of shit.  It does not build confidence when it comes time to decide if, when, or how to engage with a broken relationship. 

And the relationship in question is severely broken.

I remember a time when it wasn’t.  Or at least I remember a time before I knew it was broken.  I remember trusting.  I remember being trustworthy myself (because the Depression Monster exaggerates about how much I am awful, it doesn’t mean that I’m not sometimes awful.).  It hurts to remember.

It’s possible I’m blowing everything out of proportion.  On the face of it, I have to deal with a fairly simple request.  That it came after I asked not to be contacted anymore and that it came packed with red flags complicates things.  I don’t know what to do.

So I ask myself questions.  What would be kind?  To whom?  What is realistic?  What are the costs?  What would the people who love me tell me?

No answers, but I’ll probably be awake thinking a long time.