Estrella, John Carlos S.

BA Political Science
WRP 106 | 2nd Semester SY: 2021-2022

BK4: Forgiveness

Usually, when we talk about forgiveness the norm is always “me forgiving someone or
vice versa”. Hence, on this paper I will try to offer another perspective on how forgiveness deals
with freeing YOURSELF too.

We must forgive those who hurt us, even if whatever they did to us is unforgivable in our
mind. We will forgive them not because they deserve to be forgiven, but because we no longer
want to suffer and hurt ourselves every time, we remember what they did to us. It doesn’t matter
what others did us, we are going to forgive them because we don’t want to feel sick all the time.
Forgiveness is for our own mental healing. We will forgive because we feel compassion for
ourselves.

Forgiveness is an act of self-love. Forgive yourself for the times depression made you
cynical about recovery. For staying too long in a bad situation or relationship because your anxiety
wouldn't allow you to leave. For hurting yourself in ways others never could. For feeling useless
even when you were burned out because you felt like you were never enough. Forgive yourself.

Upon writing this paper, I realized that forgiveness can never be achieved without trust,
not in others but in ourselves. For example, every time we committed to changing our lifestyle to
a healthier one and broke that commitment, we broke our own trust. Every time we said we would
do something for ourselves and didn't, our trust in ourselves dwindles. It's something that we don't
notice 99.8% of the time. When we commit to eating healthier, going to the gym 5x a week, stop
drinking alcohol, whatever it is and we mess up because we're human our trust in ourselves tends
to break. The thing here is that, once we forgive ourselves genuinely while still holding ourselves
responsible for the changes we wanted to make, we will experience the truest sense of satisfaction
and fulfillment.
 This society, particularly the patriarchal system, puts extremely high expectations on us,
particularly on people like me who do not conform to the binary system. For the longest time, I
put so much pressure on myself to be the absolute best version of myself to the point where
whenever I commit a mistake, I beat myself up hardly. Hence, I want to encourage you to sit down,
reflect, and above all forgive yourself. Forgive yourself for every time you wanted to show up for
yourself but didn't or couldn't. Give yourself grace for being human and for figuring it out. Truly
forgive yourself. Tell yourself that each effort to change is better than not changing at all. Then
pick yourself back up and try again. Make the change, step by step, to honor yourself and while
you're at it, let yourself off the hook. Having high standards for yourself is a great thing, but not if
it destroys the trust you have for yourself. Finding the balance between high standards to achieve
your goals and dreams and giving yourself grace when you fall short is the difference you need to
finally make permanent changes. This is how liberating the feeling of forgiveness is.