The You-Half of Forgiveness

Because selfishness is a good start.

God, do I love a good Jason Statham movie.

Especially the revenge ones. Wrath of Man. Beekeeper.

They're just 90-minute ensembles of the most satisfying carnage imaginable. The broken bones become therapeutic. We like watching him win; taking back what he lost, through violence.

It feels right. Like justice. Like how the world should work.

Bad guys do bad things. Good guys beat the living shit out of them until order is restored. A masculine love story.

But we all know that’s not true.

In the real world, the scales remain unbalanced. And if you tried to unleash some Statham-level hurt on your enemies, there likely would be a movie made about you. Except that it would be a crime documentary…while you’re in jail.

So, what the hell are we supposed to do?

When our world breaks, how do we start putting it back together? Without losing ourselves in the process?

Choosing Different

Let me begin by saying that I am the least qualified person to be writing about forgiveness (our f-word of the week).

I’m coming to this topic as much a student as anyone else reading. There are relationships I’ve let remain broken; entire groups of people I still have trouble being in the same room with.

But I think there’s something important here. Something worth writing about.

Forgiveness is one of those words that doesn’t show up much in the male vocabulary. We prefer revenge.

I think that hurts us more than we realize.

So, we’re going to dig around a bit because I think what we’ll find, underneath a few dozen layers of dirt, is a more powerful version of ourselves.

Defining Blame

We blame as a way of signaling that something is broken in the world. Our world, specifically.

Blame is why we root for Jason Statham's characters in the first place. Somebody is in the wrong; responsible. And that needs correcting.

But the how is where things get all jumbled up.

We think blame is like this heavy backpack full of rocks that we strap on to the bad guy’s back, signifying the responsibility they carry for whatever misdeed they did.

But blame is actually a gas. A poisonous one at that. And whenever we try to trap our enemies in a room full of it, things never quite work out the way we hope.

The gas expands, travels, seeps out, and surrounds us. Blaming others is mere centimeters from blaming the world, which itself is folded atop blaming ourselves.

Blame is like glitter. It feels like a good idea, but just ends up getting fucking everywhere.

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Blame is not permission to correct the situation however we see fit (i.e., revenge).

It’s the assignment of responsibility, not the acceptance of it.

When I say I don’t want to forgive X, what I’m really saying is that I don’t want them to get away with what they did. I don’t want them to be “off the hook.”

But blame doesn’t get us what we want. Blame is not justice or punishment. It’s not power.¹

And that’s why forgiveness matters.

Redefining Power

It’s ironic that the word “power” has come up in almost every single f-word article we’ve published. That was never my intention.

I wanted to write about emotions. About the stuff I felt like I couldn’t really talk to other men about – but honestly, kind of really fucking need to.

And so, I wrote, and every time I did, I kept bumping up against this idea of power. I thought it was just feature of my writing. Kind of like how I do Whatever. The. Hell. I. Want. with punctuation. 

But as we near the end of this series, I think it’s something more. In fact, I think it might be everything.

From what I can tell, there are only two kinds of power in the world:

1. The power over others.

2. The power over yourself.

The first one is everywhere. We think about it all the time. We worship it. Rich CEOs and politicians and influencers are admired in large part because of the power they have over other people — through money or reach or legislation.

We want a piece of it. Or at least I do, most of the time.

I want that sort of power because I want to feel admired. But even deeper than that, I want to feel safe. I want to feel provided for. I want to feel protected. And wielding power over others feels like the way to get those things.

But then I started writing this series and reading incredible people and sitting with my insides and I discovered something.

The second type of power is what we actually want.

Being able to navigate your fears and failures, to control your focus and award yourself freedom, to color your world as fun, enter flow, and fake your way forward into anyone you want to be — these are foreign in everyday life, but valuable. Necessary. And the ability to do them is powerful.

Autonomy might be the simplest word we’re going after for this type of power. The dictionary calls it "self-governance," but I like to say it's the ability to influence your own life.

You will never get it by increasing your power over others. How can it? No matter how rich or influential you become, you will never be able to control every person in your life. You will always be at the mercy of other people’s decisions and mistakes and desires and fuck ups.

And that’s why so many powerful figures seem so angry. They’ve given everything to accruing the first kind of power and have come up short. Their worlds continue to spin outside their control, and it infuriates them.

Clichés aside, the only real power that exists in this life is over ourselves. It’s up to us whether we learn to wield it. And forgiveness is the entry point.

Taking Back

When we blame someone, we’re admitting that they have the ability to influence our thoughts and emotions and actions.

Forgiveness is the returning of our power, meaning we become the ones, again, who control our thoughts and emotions and actions. It does not mean erasing responsibility or forgetting all wrongdoing or relinquishing all hopes of justice. It’s all about you. Only you. And what you take back.

Ok, so how do we start?

Hell if I know, this is as far as I got in my notes 😅. (hence why I titled it "the you half...") But seriously, that feels like a bigger topic to chew on some time.

For now, it’s about starting small; sitting with your feelings; giving space to your thoughts (on paper, with a counselor); reclaiming your habits. It’s about finding little hints that your life is becoming your own again.

Thinking about forgiveness like this makes it feel less gross (to me, at least). It makes it feel less like I’m losing something and more like I’m gaining back something that was lost.

Something that I gave away.

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Challenge #9: Two Minutes, One Side, All the Power

1. Dr. Hawkins includes so many good tidbits about blame in his book Letting Go. Here is a small paragraph worth remembering: “Blame is the world’s greatest excuse. It enables us to remain limited and small without feeling guilty. But there is a cost - the loss of our freedom. Also, the role of victim brings with it a self-perception of weakness, vulnerability, and helplessness, which are the major components of apathy and depression.”