Forgiveness

I used to think I knew what forgiveness was.
But I now understand that version of forgiveness as another way I protected myself.

Another bypass. Another performance. Another mask.
Another lift out of my body and into the pretend—
out of what was real and true.
Another way to manipulate my own instrument into playing a note that didn’t belong to her.

I used to think I would know I had arrived in the land of forgiveness
because I would feel a vast expanse of serenity.
Compassion.
Peace.
Some omniscient, all-seeing calm.
A subtle chuckle at the human condition.

Until I learned that my performance looked like lifting my chin, steadying my breath, arranging my face so no one could see the tremor underneath—
pretending to be unaffected,
mastering a kind of practiced neutrality even as I felt the screwdriver twist in my soft tissue.

I used to think rising slowly out of my own body was maturity, grace, and evolution.
I used to think that proclaiming forgiveness meant I had crossed its threshold.

Forgiveness has humbled me.

I now understand that when  unimaginable atrocity and theft occurs, 
when innocence and love and the known feels stolen,
when a mother says to the killer of her child that she forgives them, she is not offering absolution.

She is reclaiming ownership of her own soul. 


I will go anywhere—into the below, the above, or the middle realms—to gather back every piece of what just scattered into the abyss

It is a battle cry rooted in devotion.
A vow to inner fidelity, even as her reality collapses around and beneath her.

I will not give you my soul. And I will not take yours in place of mine.

Because the DNA won’t match.
Because the blood type is incompatible.
Because no one can steal the light of another, and no one can safely carry what was never theirs.

The path of forgiveness brings us closer to an inner sanctuary,
but the trek is not peaceful.
It is a discipline on the long walk back home to Self.

It asks us to surrender to the black-water undertow,
to the crusting, oozing heat of the wound—
not to collapse into it, not to weaponize it,
but to preserve our dignity, our humanity,
the sacredness of having loved at all.

It asks us to feel more and think far less.
To release and release and release again.
To become endlessly curious as all of our inner parts vie for the mic.

To process the shock, the hurt, the betrayal as uniquely and wholly ours—
a story only we could tell in the way we lived it—
rather than proof that we should gather our ammunition.

It asks us to become the cycle breaker within our own system,
often one rooted deep in our lineage.
To become the change first.
To disrupt the circuitry.
To loosen the knots—
even when it feels like sitting in the center of tangled Christmas lights
woven by different generations.

To unmask before our own gaze.
To see our light and our dark honestly.
To stand under the harsh overhead light longer than we’d like
when every instinct whispers to dim the room and soften the truth.

And then, somehow, to love ourselves there.

Forgiveness asks us to witness the raised, purple jagged lines,
the spider veins,
the bruises,
the inherited traits etched into our faces and our nervous systems—
and say: I came by you honestly in my pursuit of understanding love.

It asks us to exhale.
To allow everything to rise.
To release the pretend safety we’ve gripped for too long
and feel into what is fragile, trembling, almost untouchable beneath—
the place we can barely graze for a second
before fearing we might come undone.

And then to exhale again.

It asks us to tend the grief with the same devotion of a future harvest, necessary for our survival. 
To trust that meaning lives even inside the ache, the heat, the primordial scream.

Because forgiveness is both a passage and a rite of passage—
an initiation into the underworld of the under-layers,
closer to the molten center of truth.

It is the price of freedom.
The cost of falling.
The wager of trusting in a world that will break our hearts
for the sake of revealing their size.




Beth Clayton, 2025