You Have To Forgive Yourself If You Want To Be Free

Forgiving yourself can seem nearly impossible. The past tends to sneak up on you at night. You keeping waking up in a sweat, with voices swirling around your head, telling you that you made a terrible mistake, that you hurt someone, that you took too much of someone’s heart.

It’s easy to tear yourself apart. You think to yourself, if I could hurt someone that badly, then I deserve to be in pain right now. You think, if I disappointed my parents, than I don’t deserve to succeed. You say, I don’t deserve to be happy right now. Someone on this earth is unhappy because of what I did or because of what I said. It’s easy to loathe yourself so much, that you ultimately convince yourself that you aren’t worthy of anything. You don’t get to smile because you made him give up on love a year ago, or you made her cry two days ago.

You convince yourself that you are in fact a terrible mess of a human being.

But, dwelling on what you did wrong yesterday or what you did wrong two years ago, is doing nothing but hurting you. You can’t go back to that day. You can’t change your own mind. And waking up with regret weighing you down everyday will do nothing but kill you in the end.

Here’s how you forgive yourself. Stop telling yourself that because of that one thing that you did a long time, that you should be punished. Stop telling yourself that because of something you said five years ago, that you shouldn’t experience love again. I can guarantee you that the people that you hurt or disappointed in the past, don’t even remember what you said. And the people that you burned a while ago, have moved on and are living good lives now.

You are the only one that is still hurting from the past. You are the only one kicking yourself over and over again, worrying over something that has already been forgotten. Those people whose hearts you broke? Their hearts have healed. Yours is the only one that hasn’t.

This isn’t to say that mistakes should never have consequences, but by not forgiving yourself, you have made the consequences more severe than they ever should have been.

Set yourself free of this pain. Rid yourself of the demons that keep you up at night. Stop blaming yourself for something that happened in the past. It’s done with. It is over.

Set yourself free, sweet soul. You can smile now. You are free to breathe without caution. The past is nothing but sand on the soles of your shoes, mud on your old car tires, and dusty Polaroid pictures on your refrigerator.

Set yourself free and stop setting yourself on fire for every wrong thing that you ever did. It’s time to wash it all away. Welcome the rain to clean all the wounds off of your heart. Welcome the sunshine, and welcome forgiveness.