There’s so much arguing over which things are and aren’t “forgivable” and under what circumstances you should try to “forgive” someone else or yourself
and I think none of the people arguing can even agree on what “forgiveness” means
which is understandable, because in different areas of society the word tends to be used very differently
for instance in both law and religion, to forgive someone tends to mean “recognize that they did the thing, but treat them as if they didn’t”
in law– like forgiving a loan or pardoning a crime– it means the person no longer has to complete any repayment they owe for it. Repaying the loan, serving a prison sentence. It removes what someone owed, while not denying that they did owe it
in religion– at least in Christianity in my own experience– God’s forgiveness is treated kinda the same. like, you may deserve to go to hell, but if you ask God for forgiveness then God will remove that punishment and send you to heaven anyway just as if you’d never committed a sin, because God is merciful.
so when we talk about forgiveness between two regular people, we get a lot of people acting like it means that same thing. Admit that the person did a bad thing, but treat them the same as if they didn’t. Remove all expectations for them to make repayment for what they did. Allow them back into all the spaces and relationships that you would ordinarily have cut them out of for their sin.
And between regular people, that’s not a type of “forgiveness” that’s usually workable.
If someone else treated you badly, you may come to peace with it enough in your own mind that you stop feeling anger all the time. You may even reach a sort of acceptance where you understand why and how they got to the point of doing what they did
But you may also recognize that they are still a person who might do that thing again, and you do not feel safe remaining in contact with them. Or maybe you’re even sure they have changed enough that that would never happen– but you still don’t feel like they can be in your life, because what they did changed your relationship with them to the point that it could never be a really good relationship anymore.
Is that forgiveness?
Some of us would say yes. But others would say that no, forgiveness necessarily requires letting the person do… whatever they’d be doing if the bad behavior had never happened in the first place.
Which is a thing you might be able to do if you were a god, or a legal system.
But it does not work so well between regular people.
Same with forgiving yourself. If you admit you did something bad, what does forgiveness mean for that? I don’t know. Today I saw what seemed to be an argument between two people whose definitions of it were exact opposites.
One seemed to be using it to mean “accept that you are someone who can change and improve, and put in the work to do that– instead of just deciding that you are irredeemable and should just die or never interact with people ever again.”
And the other seemed to be using it to mean “stop thinking about the fact that you did something bad; stop ever feeling bad about it; stop trying to do better or prevent that bad behavior from occurring again, stop making any effort to put in the work to be a better person.”
And that person was mad at the first person for apparently suggesting that this was the sort of “forgiveness” people should give themselves.
I don’t know.
One side effect of my interest in language is that I’m always very aware of how words don’t have inherent meanings, they just have the meanings that people use them for, and those can be very very different. And so I tend to notice, if people are arguing over something because they have different understandings of what a word means– often before the people in the argument notice it themselves.
And part of me feels as if this should be a fairly easy way to resolve the argument, if I were to step in and point it out. But in practice, this … really never works.