Dear Friend,
If you were any other kind of person, this wouldn’t be so hard.
I’ve known you for a long time. I can’t even remember when we weren’t together. I was there for you when you went through all that crazy growing up stuff, when you took your first steps out into the “real world,” when you started to find your voice. When you started to say and do what you needed to get heard. When you started to feel comfortable in your own skin, yes, even as you bemoaned the sprinkling of silver hairs and character lines it took to get there.
I couldn’t imagine being without you.
But sometimes you really piss me off.
That last time you let someone take advantage of your friendship, that really sucked. You knew exactly what would happen. You knew this person had thrown away your friendship time and again. You knew this person would come back when they suddenly needed your friendship again, your overflowing support, warmth and empathy. The listening. The just-being-there.
In fact, everything this person was incapable of giving you in return.
I know you figured that out long before you admitted it to yourself. But because this person tacked the word “friend” on it–no, it was “best friends forever,” wasn’t it?–you just went ahead and let yourself be the listener again, the giver, the supporter. Oh sure, it would be good for awhile, it always was, just like old times. So easy to get back to the laughter, the stories, the music. The pattern before the pattern changed. BFFs.
But it always ended. And you always knew it would, and you always knew it would hurt you, and each time you went ahead and invited it all back in anyway.
For the longest time, I couldn’t forgive you for that.
Then this year it all changed. You had finally had enough. That last time was the last time. You did one of the hardest things I’ve ever known you to do: You turned your back on someone you called “friend.”
You’d finally realized they didn’t deserve the name.
It took me until now to realize something: Maybe your heart just had to catch up to the rest of you, to everything telling you to give yourself the empathy and support you were giving away. Maybe there were still things you had to learn from that person and this experience. Maybe giving someone those extra chances and “being there” is just what makes you you.
And maybe you had to go through all this to be a better you.
I still don’t pretend to know everything about you. I think that’s something that’ll take a lifetime, and not even quit then. So I wanted you to know something now: You’re a pretty awesome person. I know you don’t think so. I know I don’t say it enough. Maybe if I do, one day you’ll believe it.
I forgive you. I’m sorry it took this long. But I’m glad I finally figured it out too.
Love,
Becky
(Prompt: Forgiveness. Who have you forgiven this year and what was the journey like that brought you to forgive them?
Answer: I forgave myself. Wholeheartedly, unashamedly. But oh, the struggle.)
Author Becky Benishek 
Oh my goodness, I love how honest this is. Forgiving yourself is the hardest, but you got there, and you do it with such compassion. That is exactly how it should be done!
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Thank you so much for your comment, it means a lot to me!
I think I’m still feeling a bit enervated–but it’s a healthy enervated. I hadn’t really put a cap on this past-its-expiration-date scene until now.
Also I see your blog link didn’t come through–everybody, go to http://www.noelrozny.com.
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Beautiful words, so raw and true and honest. I can feel your love, your energy…..
Thank you for visiting my blog & commenting.
(and sort of off topic, but I love your #Reverb11 image!)
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And thank you for coming over here, and leaving such a lovely comment. I really appreciate that.
Do take the image! It’s not mine, and I belatedly forgot to pull over the credit from my previous post. It’s there now.
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I wonder if it is more difficult to lay it all on the line for someone else, or for ourselves. I think perhaps for ourselves, because it is so easy to tuck away what we don’t want to think about. We have access to so many nooks and crannies of our own subconscious mind. We can stuff uncomfortable thoughts, inconvenient revelations, and fearful feelings into the drawers of the mind, stuffed already to the brim, and then squeeze it shut, where (we hope) we never find them again.
But I suppose it finds us eventually. And we can choose to fight it, or accept that it is there, and, as you say, forgive ourselves for whatever we feel guilty about that is in those drawers and closets. You should be proud of yourself for choosing the latter tonight with this post.
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Thank you Ty. We certainly can be experts at getting around ourselves when it comes to facing certain things. It can be far too seductively easy to cave in and put things off, or do a half-baked job of resolution.
In reading your comment, what came to mind is that while I do think forgiving oneself is the hardest, at least with this most recent experience, it’s still the “us” that has to forgive someone else too, so we never do get too far away from our nooks and crannies where we hide all the painful stuff. As you say, it’ll find us eventually–no matter who we’re running away from.
Thank you so much for commenting!
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I had to think about this one for a while before commenting. Ty had a similar theme to his post for this prompt. If I was doing Reverb, mine might have been similar as well haha. Except I’m not sure if I have taken that monumental step of forgiving myself my transgressions.
It’s intriguing how some of us are so hard on ourselves, and how difficult it is to forgive ourselves for things we’d easily excuse away in someone else. Why is that? The human mind is a complex thing… lol.
A very touching post.
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Yes, I was rather glad to see others had chosen themselves too, because there’s some comfort in knowing I’m not alone in this struggle.
I didn’t say it overtly here, but because I’m inside my head and know what’s going on, wrapped up in this whole topic is forgiving the “other person,” the one who set all this in motion, for being who they are, too.
Now that I’ve come off the emotional excess wrung from me during this post, the quirk has bounced back and I can’t help but remember that scene in A Room with a View:
Charlotte: “I shall never forgive myself.”
Lucy: “You always say that, Charlotte, and you always DO forgive yourself.”
Love that.
Thank you very much for commenting!
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