Sometimes, our sadness and trauma get the best of us, and we act out of character. We do things that we are not proud of—things that we go out of our way to cover up in shame. This is a reminder to forgive yourself for all the things you needed to do to drown out the noise and pain. Forgive yourself for doing things you are not particularly excited to share with people. Part of the healing journey is looking at all the ugly parts of yourself and throwing a bucket full of love, forgiveness, and acceptance. Part of the healing journey is radical self-compassion. You might need to forgive yourself over and over again for the same thing, but please forgive yourself. Don’t allow yourself to be one of the people who cannot love you unconditionally. You did what you had to do to feel relief, so let yourself be free from resentment toward yourself. Forgive yourself and make a decision to do better going forward. You can.
You are not who you became when you were just trying to survive. You are not who you became to dull the pain. You gain nothing from punishing yourself repeatedly, from picking at old wounds and making them bleed again. You did not come to this life to leave unscathed and untouched. You cannot make up for the past by withholding yourself from experiencing the present.
Take the mistakes, look at them closely, ask yourself what you have learned from them, forgive yourself, and move on. The past version of you is not some inferior version for making those mistakes; they were simply doing the best they could with the knowledge they had. Imagine if they knew that all you summed them up to be was the mistakes they made. Forgive yourself; they got you here.
