Writing Towards Forgiveness

Hi Mindful Writers,

This month we’re going somewhere that I think is one of the most challenging territories we can enter as writers — and as human beings.

Forgiveness.

Not the sanitised, tidy version of forgiveness that we’re sold. Not the kind that requires us to feel warm and fuzzy, or to pretend the past didn’t happen. The real kind, which is messier and harder and ultimately far more liberating than anything we were taught it should look like.

For a long time, I thought forgiveness meant welcoming people back into my life with open arms. That it meant getting over it and pretending nothing had happened so we could all get along. Bu every part of me rebelled against that idea, and I spent years feeling like I was failing at something fundamental about being human — because I couldn’t find a way to have a happy relationship with my mother and stepfather and act as if the past was irrelevant, the way everyone around me seemed to expect me to.

It took me a long time to understand that forgiveness is not actually a feeling. It’s a choice. And it’s not a one-time event but an ongoing practice, like mindfulness itself. Some days we forgive. Some days we need to forgive again. And some days we give ourselves permission to feel the old hurt and anger, and that’s okay too.

Forgiveness is about releasing ourselves from the prison that resentment keeps us locked up in. Choosing freedom over the familiar weight of old grievances, knowing that holding on to them means we’re making ourselves unhappy.

In our writing, we get to explore all of this complexity. Whether we’re writing fiction, memoir, poetry, or personal essays, we can go to the questions that are hardest to sit with: How do we forgive someone who never asked for forgiveness? How do we forgive ourselves for the choices we made when we were wounded? How do we forgive life itself for not being what we expected?

I’ve noticed that many of my characters are dealing with betrayal — by family members, by institutions, by lovers, friends, themselves. They carry all the history of their lives around, good and bad, like stones in their pockets, and I watch them learn, story by story, what it means to set those stones down. In a story I published in the Retreat West 10th Birthday Anthology, Ten Ways the Animals Will Save Us, the protagonist literally had a stone in her pocket she’d been carrying for many years.

Two stories that I keep returning to when thinking about forgiveness in writing are ones you might not immediately think of as forgiveness stories — but that’s part of what makes them so powerful.

The first is Karen Russell’s St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, in which a pack of wolf-girls are sent to a convent school to be civilised into human society. The story follows Claudette’s gradual assimilation — and her growing abandonment of her wild sister, Mirabella, who cannot adapt. When Mirabella is eventually expelled, Claudette doesn’t say goodbye. She leaves a packed lunch with a note that says “Best wishes!” and tells herself she’s done everything she could.

What haunts the story is what happens in the final scene, when Claudette visits her wolf parents near the end of her time at St. Lucy’s. Her mother recoils from her as if she were a stranger. And when the family looks to her expectantly, waiting to see what she has learned, Claudette says — telling her first human lie — “I’m home.”

Russell doesn’t resolve this. There is no reconciliation, no forgiveness granted or received. Instead there is something quieter and more honest: the grief of having become someone your original family no longer recognises, and the impossible task of forgiving what was done to you when doing so means forgiving yourself for what you did to others along the way. The story shows us that forgiveness can be the most complicated when the wound is woven into who we had to become to survive.

The second is A.M. Homes’s Esther in the Night, from The Safety of Objects, in which a mother caring for her son Paul, in a permanent coma after an accident, wanders her house in the early hours of the morning, running through elaborate fantasies of disaster — a burglar, a fire — as a way of processing the unbearable reality she actually lives in. She has turned her home into what she calls a museum of the living dead, giving tours, passing around his medical charts, wearing the same dress she wore the night they got the call.

What Homes understands is that some forgiveness — of life, of fate, of the terrible randomness of what happens to us — can’t be spoken or resolved. It has to be held in the body, in the repetition of days, in the strange rituals we create to keep going. The narrator’s midnight wandering is both grief and a kind of tending. It is not resolution. But it is, in its way, a form of surviving the unforgivable — finding a way to stay present inside a life that has been split in two.

Both stories show us that forgiveness often looks nothing like what we expect. It is rarely dramatic or clean. Sometimes it’s as simple as choosing a different thought. Sometimes it’s recognising that the person who hurt us was doing the best they could from where they were. Sometimes it’s understanding that we get to write a different ending to our story, even if we can’t change the beginning.