It’s been a chaotic, tragic week accounting for more violent acts and clashes stemming from gross human rights violations. Some South African and international events we had to cope with this week: the reaction to radical political action at LGBTI Joburg Pride last Saturday (see previous blog post here), the shooting of Pakistani child activist Malala Yousafzai on Tuesday and the preventable number of deaths occurring during recent strike action in South Africa are just examples of three.
Amidst all of this chaos, I read a piece of writing on forgiveness on allthingsqueer.co.za that quotes Catherine Ponder as saying:
“When you hold resentment toward another, you are bound to that person by an emotional link that is stronger than steel.
Forgiveness is the only way to dissolve that link, and get free”
While I agree with the author to a point, I disagree that we can dissolve the link entirely. Some of us can try to lessen the emotional load that usually comes with coping with past traumas. So this is, like everything else in the world, quite a personal choice that an individual makes. I don’t agree with people telling you how you should live or behave or how you should deal with emotional trauma. This is because another person cannot experience of process traumatic experiences or events like you do. Also, not all trauma can and should be forgiven, in my opinion, nor does the person/thing who inflicted the trauma be allowed back into our lives (not even if we choose to deal and come to terms with what they did to us).
That all said, my story has led me down an interesting road. I’ve always held on to hurt, guarded it like a secret and nurtured it while supposedly still “moving forward”. Deep down the rage bubbled. It reached a point, as time went on on, when it was physically and emotionally causing me distress and destroying my relationships with those close to me; sabotaging new ones. In recent years, I’ve seen the difference working through old baggage – letting some of it go – has 
had on my life and I feel so grateful to all those people who stuck out the process with me. You see, it’s a far more complicated process than the above article lets on.
Based on my experiences and thoughts on why it had helped, I found the process (should you want and choose to start it) works well when one is in relatively safe, stable and supportive environments where the constant threat of similar infractions and trauma reoccurring isn’t present. It makes the most sense that we would then have the true freedom to make the choice of how to best move forward for ourselves.
This often isn’t the case for those experiencing society’s multiple levels of oppression all at once, those lacking the privilege of some to be able to rationalise their emotional trauma/pain. Often people are expected or told to “move on”, to “stop living in the past”; “stop pulling the [x,y,z] card”. That’s a quite an arrogant, disrespectful assumption in itself and only further deepens the hurt, making it less likely for the desired change to happen.
Perhaps it has to be recognised first, that most of us humans need acknowledgement on a very basic level; acknowledgement of our lives, of our memories, of the paths we’ve travelled and of our emotional scars. This is needed to build trust in our connections and in our ourselves. This acknowledgement doesn’t come from words or documents written, but in micro-actions conveying a kindness and respect for the other person or groups of people. It’s in the very language we use daily.
In a book, called Soul Prints by Marc Gafni, he maps out my beliefs about this pretty practically with some situational contexts. I ignorantly passed over the book on my shelf for years after I received it as a gift. I have strong feelings of disdain for the exploited “self-help” genre or its incestuous “religiously themed” cousin, you see. To me, “Soul Prints” sold itself at face value as such. I was wrong for the most part. But I digress.
When there is unkindness, acts and words that “other” people, a dismissal/violation (on a macro or micro level) of us and the very experiences that have shaped us, of our very “soul identities” in Gafni’s definition, we get hurt to our core. The pain we feel often manifests in different ways – loneliness, depression, anxiety, aggression, violence, self-victimization and inflicting abuse on others are all a few common examples. These all affect the way we wade through our lives and interact with people.
For these reasons, these macro and micro repeat offences on our “soul prints”, so to speak, we find it truly difficult to simply “let go”, to “move forward”. Some of us have every single right to freely choose not to forgive. Some of us succeed initially in lightening our emotional load only to fall off the wagon every now and then, when similar acts trigger reactions from us we cannot unlearn immediately; or sometimes ever. And that’s OK. It’s also part of the process find what works for us and the different, often bumpy paths we travel to find peace.
Our awareness of why we react the way we do, from what places and perspectives, helps in preventing us from hurting others in retaliation to our own hurt; prevents us from subconsciously spreading the damage in our close relationships and interactions with new people. On paper, like most things, it’s easier said than done. We have to want to face our own failures too. That’s the toughest part.
Ramblings in the Mi[d]st 