09/02/2021
Thanks Nifemi and Samanta
"Forgive, and be..." by guest writer Nifemi Maxwell
When I was a kid, I found the concept of was “forgiveness” hard to understand. Those motivational speakers who said “when you forgive others, you are helping yourself more than the other person” confused me even more. They had to be confused. How would forgiving someone help me, or hurt them? Was I just meant to trust in fate to deliver justice? This did not sit well with me, and secretly, I felt some enjoyment in holding a grudge.
I’ve always been a foodie. There was only one thing in the world I loved more than Nutella on my mum’s hot homemade bread, and that was “payback”. You know how it goes; Mum offends me, and for the next week I don’t smile at her, don’t eat her food, and avoid talking to her or laughing at her jokes. I keep this up until she apologizes, or someone else in the family does something becomes a new target.
I remember a day some years back when I told my uncle I was hungry. He looked at my tummy and jokingly wondered how I still had space in it for food. Two of his friends were there and they laughed. I was hurt and angry. This uncle worked at a bank, and had the unusual habit of buying suits that were a size larger than he needed. This meant that he was particularly reliant on wearing belts to stop his pants dropping from his waist. So, in retaliation, I decided to hide all his belts before work. He had to use a scarf to hold his trousers, leading to even more ridicule than I had suffered.
As I grew older, I accepted that I was an unforgiving person. I told myself that it wasn’t such a bad thing because it made the people in my life reluctant to offend me. How else would I get respect? Or so I thought. But I soon realized that people had begun to avoid me all together. Those that didn’t, or couldn’t, were cautious around me, constantly walking on eggshells. If I joined a group of friends, they’d stop laughing and start shifting uncomfortably. I thought being unforgiving was my armour. But instead, it left me alone.
Being unforgiving puts too much focus on how others behave towards you. It gives you the illusion of thinking that you are incapable of offending others. If you do offend others, you blame them for it because “they made me do it”. Being unforgiving is a gateway, through which it brings along its little cousins—self-centredness, arrogance, vindictiveness and misery. As it turns out, I offended a lot of people, but I didn’t see it. I couldn’t see it. I was holding people to impossible standards, which of course, I couldn’t meet either.
I’m not saying you should sweep every insult under the carpet, or smile and keep quiet when others try to take advantage of you. What I’m saying is live and let live. I’m still figuring out how forgiveness helps me more than the other person, but this much I have learned: everybody needs forgiveness from time to time. If you cut everyone some slack, and forgive people as much as you would hope to be forgiven, you will live a happier life. Are you still holding a grudge or expecting forgiveness?
