Forgiveness

The act of reclaiming.

I sat down on my bed today contemplating whether or not to forgive. I was hurt. I was angry. I wanted them to feel the depth of my pain. I knew holding out on those words “I forgive you” would not measure up on the pain they’d caused me.

I’m just a girl. A hurting girl.

But then these questions came to me: Why do we forgive anyway? Is it because God forgave us first? If forgiveness never existed, would humanity still exist? Maybe we would have destroyed each other long ago under the weight of anger and unhealed hurt.

I thought more about this while watching Exhibiting Forgiveness, and one scene has been haunting me. The father takes his son out to collect trash cans, doing odd jobs. The boy steps on a nail, and it pierces right through his foot. Instead of checking if the wound was infected or even letting him rest, the father tells him to walk it off because he’s a Black boy , and Black boys don’t get it easy. He pushes him to keep working, mowing lawns with blood in his shoe, as though pain were just some part of survival.

So, with his injured foot, the boy went on, did all that work, and by the end of the day they actually made a lot of money. For a moment he was happy (I was happy too) , thinking, okay, at least Mom will be glad we brought this much money. But then the father told him, “You’re not going to tell your mom about this money we made”. And what did he do? He used it to buy drugs. Not medication oo. Crack!

Please, how do you forgive this?

He didn’t even think to take his son to the hospital.

Out of anger, the boy jumped out of the car and walked all the way home in the dark. That scene really pissed me off. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, hence, me having his mini-crash out. If this happened to me, omo it would have been really hard to forgive.

And then to make things worse, years later, the mom was pleading with him to forgive his father. She even said she still loved him, after everything. That was wild. So so crazy and brazy.

But how do you even forgive a wound that was planted in you as a child, one that shaped the man you became?

The son in that film carried his unforgiveness , not in a loud way, but in his nightmares and his art. He painted and created beautiful pieces but beneath it hurt was his real medium. The father’s treatment towards him and his mum when he was a child haunted him, shaping him as much as his talent did.

Compared to him, my current hurt feels… smaller, less dramatic. But that’s the thing, unforgiveness doesn’t always have to scream. It lingers in the quiet moments.

I catch myself replaying conversations and reeling over what someone did to hurt me, I even go as far as holding back my love or trust just to show how pained I felt in that moment. As I watched him, I realized, unforgiveness is like a shadow, and whether it’s big or small, it still follows you until you make the decision that it’s enough.

I like to think that to forgive isn’t about erasing the past— his father will always be who he was and my hurt will always have happened. But maybe forgiveness is about choosing not to let those things have the final edit of the story. So it’s not about excusing, it’s making a choice.

So here I am, on my bed, wondering if letting go might free me more than it frees them.