Forgive Others to Set Yourself Free
For three years, I carried my anger toward him like a sacred flame, tending it daily, feeding it with fresh memories of his betrayal, keeping it burning bright as if my continued fury could somehow retroactively change what he had done. I believed my resentment was justice, my bitterness was loyalty to my own wounded self, my refusal to forgive was the only power I had left in a situation where I had been powerless.
But rage, I discovered, is the most inefficient prison system ever devised. It locks up the guard along with the prisoner.
He had moved on—new job, new relationship, new city. He was probably not thinking about me at all, certainly not losing sleep over my forgiveness or the lack thereof. Meanwhile, I was the one carrying the weight of his actions, reliving the betrayal daily, poisoning my present moments with the toxicity of past wounds. I was the one serving a life sentence for crimes he had committed.
That’s when I realized forgiveness isn’t a gift you give to someone else—it’s a key you use to unlock your own prison cell.
This understanding feels almost offensive at first. Shouldn’t forgiveness require some acknowledgment from the person who hurt you? Shouldn’t it demand remorse, apology, change? Shouldn’t the person who broke something be responsible for fixing it?
But forgiveness that depends on other people’s cooperation isn’t really forgiveness—it’s a transaction. True forgiveness is unilateral, unconditional, and ultimately selfish in the most positive way. It’s a decision you make for your own peace, your own freedom, your own ability to move forward without dragging the weight of old wounds.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean excusing what happened, pretending it wasn’t harmful, or inviting repeat behavior. It doesn’t require maintaining relationship or offering trust that hasn’t been rebuilt. It simply means releasing your claim on their debt to you, not because they deserve release but because you deserve freedom.
The person I needed to forgive most wasn’t him—it was myself. For trusting when I should have been cautious. For missing red flags that seem obvious in retrospect. For staying too long, loving too hard, believing too easily. The anger I directed at him was really anger at myself, projected outward because self-forgiveness felt more impossible than forgiving him.
But carrying resentment toward yourself is even more exhausting than carrying it toward others. You can avoid someone who hurt you, but you can’t avoid yourself. Self-resentment is a 24/7 companion, a constant narrator reminding you of every mistake, every misjudgment, every moment when you should have known better.
Learning to forgive myself required accepting that I did the best I could with the information I had at the time, that trusting people isn’t a character flaw even when it leads to pain, that being hurt doesn’t make me stupid—it makes me human.
The miracle of forgiveness isn’t that it changes the past—it doesn’t. The miracle is that it changes your relationship to the past, transforms you from a victim of what happened to a person who survived what happened and chose to keep growing.
Tonight I practice forgiveness not as a favor to anyone else but as an act of self-care, recognizing that the only person imprisoned by my resentment is me, and I hold the key to my own cell.