Acknowledging the Past: Beginning to Forgive

Last week I started working part-time for a non-profit company whose business is to help foster self-esteem, courage, and confidence in girls.  My role is to help five teenage girls, who've been selected as scholarship candidates, write their scholarship essays.  The first priority is to get these girls comfortable with themselves and their stories.  Each of them has overcome adversity in some tremendous way and, with the help of this non-profit organization, has developed some of the necessary tools for building inner strength, optimism, charity, and all-around awesomeness.
I have worked with these girls for 8 hours, and I am already in love with them--their spirit, their passion, their beauty.  They are smart, hard-working, caring individuals who want to spend their lives making the world a better, safer place for others.

On Tuesday, I introduced an activity that was intended to help the girls understand a painful part of their past.  I asked each of them to write a letter of forgiveness to someone who had wronged or injured them.  The letter needed to be directly addressed to the person, and it needed to include the following: 1) what the person did to hurt you; 2) how it made you feel; 3) why you are writing the letter--to confront and forgive; and 4) why you forgive the person.  I said it was a letter they never had to give to the person unless they wanted to, but that whether they felt they could truly forgive at this time wasn't what was important; the important part was in releasing the pain and trying to forgive--practicing forgiveness.

All of the girls began writing without hesitation.  As I sat there pretty much staring at each of them in their vulnerability, their innocence, and their courage, I felt like I should be doing something myself.  So I began writing my own letter of forgiveness.  It started as something I would use as an example for the girls--and to show them that I wasn't asking them to do something I wasn't willing to do.  And then the program leader--the woman who hired me--started writing a letter of her own.

I wrote a letter to my biological father.  I will spare you all of the messy details, but basically I told him how much I hated him for abandoning me and my brother and for starting another family and pretending that we didn't exist.  I told him I hated him for various other ills I perceived I've suffered as a result of his neglect.  I also wrote that I forgive him for his wrongs, and his weakness.  The letter was easy to write.  I could sense two of the girls sitting across from me--they lifted their heads and put their pens down.  They were finished with their letters.  I was still scribbling away, faster now, but not because I was anxious to finish and not have the girls waiting on me; I had a lot to say, and my mind flung ideas out faster than I could capture them on paper.  I wanted to say more than I did--I hadn't realized just how much I wanted to say to him.

When all of us had finished, I proposed that we each read our letters.  I started.  I could set the example of reading the thing that had been kept a secret in the heart, and the girls would see how easy it was after all, how brave I was to share with them--people I'd practically just met, and they would happily follow suit.  I was not prepared for what happened.

As I read the letter, my voice began to shake.  I felt tears coming from...somewhere.  What was happening?  I was forty years old.  I had dealt with my childhood, and the injustices it brought.  My biological father had been dead for almost fifteen years.  I didn't cry when I heard of his death.  In fact, I'd never cried over him--not since the day he came to visit when I was nine years old and I clutched his pant leg, begging him not to leave.  And now, here I was, reading this letter--a letter he would never see--and I was an emotional mess.  I kept reading the best I could, pausing at sentences like “We needed you,” and at words like “forgive,” until I could say them.  Remembering the reasons I hated him was not as difficult as admitting them aloud.  Even more surprising was the fact that I hated him at all.  I'd spent my entire life avoiding thoughts of him, sweeping him and the mess he'd made of our family under the carpet.  I thought I'd transcended hatred, thought I had magically made a little temple of forgiveness in my heart that I never needed to acknowledge.  What I experienced in those few minutes of reading that letter to the first important man in my life was something for which I never could have prepared.

My colleague--the program director, stood up and hugged me and offered me a Kleenex.  And then an amazing thing happened.  She read her letter.  And she cried.  And then another amazing thing happened, two of the girls read their letters.  One cried; the other did not.  The two girls who did not read their letters cried.  They cried while we all read ours, and I am certain they cried because their pain was so heavy that they had to leave it on the page, as if saying the words out loud might somehow literally cause their hearts to break.  

When I designed this exercise, I thought it would be a good way for the girls to start getting comfortable with their stories so they can become effective writers about their stories.  I had no idea it would allow them to dig this deep.  And I certainly had no idea that I had any more digging to do in my own life.

Sometimes people think that their past traumas hold nothing of significance, and that what happened just goes away if they stop thinking about it.  But the truth is, we carry our injustices, our pain, and our pride with us for many years, and they become the scars that make us who we are.  To deny the scars is to deny parts of ourselves, the most important parts, the parts responsible for giving us grit, determination, strength, and resolve.  To acknowledge them is to do right by ourselves in some attempt, no matter how meager, to protect and to understand.  When we take a good, hard look at our past, we can learn to read it like a book, with all of its morals and messages, and we can learn to avoid the pitfalls and tragedies that have endangered us along the way.  Through reflection and education, we begin to see that we are capable of drawing and following a map, one that leads to happiness, success, and freedom.

One girl, in her letter, denounced her father for his sins against her mother, which included violent abuse, infidelity, and sexual disease transmission. She also raged against him, calling him “a disgusting excuse for a man,” for abandoning her.  I cried as she read her letter with the face of a stoic.  Her heart is hard, and she wears that fine mask of indomitability, an impenetrable layer of defensiveness, to protect herself.  She is worried about her scholarship essays because "it's not like [this non-profit organization] fixed everything and now I'm fine.  These problems are ongoing."   I smiled at her bold pronouncement of reality, and I assured her that she didn't need to be fixed or cured, and that certainly, if there is a cure for all the pain she's endured, she is the cure.  Only she can do the work necessary to heal.  And that is when she smiled.  And hope walked right in. 

Hello, Forty!

I'm officially forty.  I don't feel any different.  I suppose I really didn't think I'd feel different--didn't think I'd wake up with bricks for ankles or a few extra hairy moles on my chin.  But forty is such an odd number.  Well, it's an even number, actually, but it's strange to think that I've been on this earth for forty years.  When I was young and heard of people being forty, that meant they were near death.   I feel quite young, to my surprise and delight.  Let me rephrase that; I feel the same.  My friend who turned forty just two days before me warned, "Don't do it!" as if I had some magic spell to reverse aging and turn back time.  For all the woes and jokes, and for all the time we spend wishing we were younger, how many of us would really turn back time if we could?  How many of us would want to relieve high school or our twenties?  Or even our thirties, for that matter?
I don't know about you, but I spent a lot of my youth feeling, well, unsettled and awkward.  In high school, I started with braces on my teeth and even after I had them removed my sophomore year, I still spent much of my time feeling too fat, too lonely, too disconnected.  And I had friends and boyfriends, and I was a decent athlete and student.  So what does that say?  Does everybody feel out of sorts in high school, no matter how popular?  Maybe the homecoming queen never felt weird.  I wouldn't know about that.  I always felt under-pretty also.  Even though I needed the athletic body I had, I wished I was slimmer and prettier than I was.  And there was nothing I could do about it.  I suppose I could have stopped eating Reese's Peanut Butter Cups at break time.  But I was easily burning those calories during basketball practice, right?
My twenties were mixed with the uncertainty about my future and the angst about my relationships.  I wanted to be loved by everybody, even those I couldn't have cared less about.  I wanted the boys to want me and the girls to want to be like me.  Now that I think about it, I wanted this in high school as well.  What creates that feeling of emptiness and desire in a girl?  It's not like I had nobody in my corner.  I had a loving family--a family who CHOSE me, of all things.  Most people have families who have to put up with them because of some birthright responsibility nonsense.  I had friends, teammates, coaches who surrounded me.  But for some reason, that was never enough.  I wanted an all-consuming love.  And so despite the fact that I sought it out, I continued to fall short of achieving the thing I wanted most.
After college, I began teaching full time almost immediately.  My students ate me alive for a year or two.  I cried a lot.  I cursed the piles of journals and essays I'd collected.   I became paralyzed at the thought of planning tomorrow's lesson because it was eleven p.m. and there was a stack of papers in the corner that was tall enough to ride Space Mountain, and I had no idea how I was going to make the Puritans interesting or why my students even needed to know about the Puritans in an English class.  But I showed up every day, and I never died.
Two years into my teaching career, the WNBA was formed.  I seriously contemplated trying out.  I thought I could give a good go of it, even though I was relatively out of basketball-playing shape.  I kept saying that I should do it or always regret not doing it.  I let the chance pass me by, largely because I didn't truly believe I could make the league, but also because I was just too damn tired from teaching.
When I was twenty-six, I married a man I shouldn't have married.   But again, I was so glad that someone wanted me, I did what I was supposed to do when someone asks you to marry them: I said "Yes."  Four years later, we got divorced, and the feelings of inferiority continued.  I'm glossing over this part of my life purposely.  None of us has time for it.
My thirties became a time of soul-searching, spirit-discovering, character-building, and more confidence than I'd ever known.  Those years were pretty great, but I let my career eat me up.  If I let my students eat me alive in my early twenties, I let the workaholism break me in my late thirties.  I was more secure than ever in my career--I felt like a veteran, true to the task of teaching every day, dedicated to helping my students become better thinkers and writers.  But I was ready to crack.  And so I decided to take a break.  My personal life during those years was, well, pretty stagnant.  After thirty-five, I'd say, is where I began to be consumed by my job.  I was too tired to think about having a personal life.  I tried, but I'd often back out of commitments because I was too tired by the time the event came around.  Sometimes I fell victim to the migraine.  I suffered from about three migraines a month, the worst of them lasting two weeks.  My health was in serious jeopardy.  I felt least like myself and most like a shell of a person who robotically slammed the alarm clock every morning, slept while showering, and drove to work in a frantic haze.  I was rushed.  All the time.  I inhaled food during lunch break, and I was perpetually late to appointments. I stayed in my pajamas all day every Saturday just to attempt to recover from the week's attack.  I put off the grading of papers until the last minute, where I would whine about how many hours it was taking me to do them justice.  And I stopped working out regularly.
A wonderful thing that happened in my thirties was that I did manage to find time to fall in love with an amazing man, to whom I am now married.   And I did some traveling around the world.  So my thirties were not a complete waste.  But I'd gotten to the point of no return--if I would have kept on like I was, what would I be--who would I be--ten, twenty, thirty years down the road?  Would I look back on my life's accomplishments and see a woman I barely recognized?  Or worse, would I see a woman I didn't want to claim as myself?
Now, I am forty.  Forty.  Forty of anything is a lot.  And I have the wrinkles to show for it.  But forty is not a curse.  Being here for forty years means I have learned to be grateful for what I have, for who I am, and for the people in my life.  Forty means those wrinkles I have are proof of laughter and experience.  Forty means that the body I have may not be the body I'd hoped for, but it's the body that's carried me through my life.  This body was homeless once as a child.  This body was an All-American basketball player.  This body suffered life-threatening blood clots.  This body has walked inside of the Great Pyramids, skinny-dipped in the Mediterranean, traversed the streets of London; this body has taken me anywhere and everywhere I've wanted to go.  And ultimately, it hasn't let me down.  I'm thinking that forty is a gift--a gift I give to myself by allowing it to happen gracefully.
Forty-year-old self, I will not hate you or berate you.  I will not speak ill of you to your face or behind your back.  I will not compare you to others or criticize your weaknesses.  I will not humiliate you by pointing out your flaws.  Instead of using you against yourself, Forty-year-old self, I will honor your experience and expertise.  I will appreciate your unique beauty and your strength.  You've come a long way--you've traveled far and wide to get to this place, and you are where you need to be.  You deserve a quiet, loving, accepting home.  Just as my family chose me and welcomed me with open arms, I welcome you into this new era--this new frame of mind.  Thank you, forty years for all you've been, for all you've taught.  What I've learned cannot be bought.  I move forward today as I never have before, into a new decade, into a place of wonder, hope, and pride.  As I lay my head on my pillow each night, it will be with great love for all that I am and all I've become.