I get it, you are wounded. You are suffering and in pain. Whether it’s emotional, physical or possibly both, you did not cause this, someone else did.
“THEY DID IT!”
It’s hard to understand why people hurt us. Unfortunately, I can’t give you an answer to that. Yet, what I can tell you from my own experience is, the only reason anyone does anything, is mostly because they are selfish.
People are selfish.
There it is folks, plain and simple. It was never about you, it was always about them. Even if their actions directly effected you or sent your life into a tail spin. You were simply a causality of war. The war we are all fighting.
The war of life.
Maybe war seems a little too harsh for some of you but I know it’s the truth for me and many others. The war between right and wrong, to hate or to love. Biting our tongue or lashing out. The war between wants and needs, truth or lie. I’m in or I’m out and a million other wars in between.
We fight every damn day of our lives. As a result, we don’t even know that we are fighting or that peace is patiently waiting in the wings.
We think we have peace. There are moments that we do but for the most part, we are just at war. With “them,” the man, our family and most of the time, all of the time, with ourselves.
Sometimes we lose that war and then there are the casualties I spoke about. Sometimes those casualties are me and you.
So here we lay. Covered in blood, screaming at the sky, cursing “them,” cursing life, crying over our wounds and bleeding to death. A spiritual death… because no longer are we just wounded, we are now choosing to suffer.
We can not undo what is done. The axe has fallen; the scars will remain but who will you become after the wounds have healed? Will you walk around and show everyone your scars?
“Here, see this?! You see what I have suffered?!”
Will you look for pity, while becoming depressed or angry? Raise your fists to fight yet again but this time for revenge, for victory? I promise you, there will be no victor.
Or, will you forgive?
Forgiveness does not forgive the action. Forgiveness does not even have anything to do with them. It’s about healing yourself. It’s about purging the hate, sadness, anger, fear, gut wrenching pain that you are holding in your body. That pain you are carrying is making you sick, whether you want to admit it or not. It is rotting you away from the inside and I believe, will eventually show it’s face somewhere else, in the physical body.
Holding on to resentment is not hurting them, it’s hurting us.
So how do we forgive, even the most heinous crimes?
You just choose too. It’s that simple.
The power is always within us to forgive; we just have to be willing to give up being “right,” about them being so wrong. To accept the past and see the human in them. Know that they are hurting too because no human who is without suffering, could cause harm to another.
We are all suffering, some of us more than others but we don’t have to.
I know you are hurting. So cry. Scream and thrash about, purge that hate and sadness. All of it. Don’t push it down or away. Don’t make it small or insignificant. It is real and true! You are entitled to feel how ever you see fit but don’t you hang on to it. A burning ember stays hot long after the fire is gone and you will keep burning yourself deeper and deeper the longer you keep it in your grasp.
It’s time we end our suffering and bring peace to our aching hearts.
Just forgive, even when you think you can’t, then forgive again and again until it becomes who you are. What you do. When we can all have peace in our hearts, the wars with each other will end, for in the end we are only at war with ourselves.
Write back soon, love Annie.
