have you ever forgiven anyone?

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This past Sunday, the marathon runs through the front window of our house. Sweat silvers every person’s shoulders, and there are so many ways to run. Some run with gravity in their heels, seats sat back and low. Others tilt so far forward it is as if they are falling into gravity. Tutus, and short-shorts, one man in a full zoot suit. Another man skateboards by, part of the marathon but given his own lane. His arms and legs have been amputated, so he pushes at the street with his residual limb-leg. He’s in a bright red hockey jersey and he’s flying. Zips through my window and onward, toward the looming buildings of downtown.

Any one who chooses the marathon knows that we must learn how to endure. I suspect they also know that there are so many things we will need to endure without choosing them. Choosing to practice endurance then is a privilege and a practice, but neither of this changes the fact of its brutality.

Years ago, when I was training for a half-marathon, I kept faltering at the seventeenth kilometre. It wasn’t my legs, or even my lungs, that were tripping up, my coach explained. It’s your mind.

She set me on a course of training the hard points. Of practicing barreling into the moment of quitting and then, just even for a second or two, gasping my way deeper into it. Sometimes, she told me, there is no getting past it. You must learn, first in small ways, that you can endure the hard moment.

*

Have you ever forgiven anyone?

RJ, my therapist has been touting forgiveness for years. Every time I end up in his office, virtual or realized, and we get on to the topic of a person, here or there that brings up in me an awful feeling, sticky, and a little helpless, but angry too, all of it swirling in a nauseous and brutal brew, RJ tells me the awful feeling is likely shame. That it is one of the most pernicious and difficult to shift emotions. That if we steep in shame for long periods of time, it can turn into a thick sediment. Choke up our arteries. Slow living down. Make shifting or changing seem impossible.

I come by the feeling honestly. This person or two, there’s been real pain inflicted. And, as I tell RJ, on the bad days, I’m afraid of these people and on the good days, I’m angry with them. And on the days in between, I wonder why they won’t just leave me alone.

Always, the gentle nod. The listening scratch of RJ’s pen on his yellow legal pad. Then, the inevitable offer —

Forgiveness?

For years, my shaking head. My flat palm in the air.

I don’t want to hear about it, I tell him. Give me another way.

*

I am walking the river a lot these days. Blisters on the soles of my feet inside my Vans. J and I hike the wooded slopes and the city falls away. Only the faint rumble of the train I lean on in my living can be heard. We get so lost that we are bushwhacking through gnarled bushes, their stalks thick like trunks, but spiralled into each other and so many. There’s spiders in my hair.

We choose the path through the thickness. Or, I should say, we choose to plunge into the thicket of growth and make our own way. I am not having a good time. I imagine spiders clicking their four pairs of heels together at the entrance to the cavern of my ears and going on an adventure of a lifetime. The magic schoolbus of spiders burrowing into my ear canal and wondering at the wax museum of my interior.

J is certain that if we continue, eventually we will find the path that’s meant for people but as my Vans, which are held together by literal will, the seams at the toes entirely pulled away from the fabric, my socks flashing with every step, skid down the slope and I have to grab the thin, spiralling arm of a tree (or is it a bush? there’s no trunk? why does my mind skip like this when I am afraid?) to slow my descent, I tell him: Enough. Let’s hike back up the way we came. Let’s find another way around.

Everything requires discernment. Sometimes, you have to train your brain that you can continue. And sometimes, you have to train your brain that it’s okay to stop. Admit there is a limit and you have reached it. And MY WORD what it takes to know the difference.

*

I reached my own limit of a kind, teetering at the edge of the new year. The final exhaustion of hefting around The Bad Feeling.

All right, I said to RJ. Let’s try it your way.

*

His way was simple: a statement to be repeated anytime I felt the feeling starting to swamp me: I forgive ——— because I want to live free. That was it.

I left his office and before I was at the parking lot, I’d already needed to repeat the words three times. I forgive ——— because I want to live free. I forgive ——— because I want to live free. I forgive ——— because I want to live free.

*

RJ makes it clear to me that the forgiveness practice is not one of permission. Forgiving someone, he explains, does not mean that what they did to you was acceptable or right. It does not mean a repair of relationship. Forgiving someone, he insists, has nothing to do with their behaviour and everything to do with yours.

You do not have to live shackled to the Bad Feeling, he tells me. Forgiveness can set you free from it.

But what they’ve done — I say.

It’s their burden to know how or if they can live with that, RJ tells me.

He is gentle when he assures me that forgiveness also does not negate the facts of what I have had to experience. To endure.

But you don’t have to stay there, he says. You can live with those facts differently.

*

Some days, I say the words a hundred times a day. But inexplicably, after a few months, I begin to say them less. And now, I realize, it’s been at least a month since I’ve said them at all.

*

It’s inexplicable, RJ tells me when I tell him that I am furious because the words worked.

Why? he asks.

How does it work? I want to know.

He shrugs.

I didn’t even WANT to forgive anyone, I explain. I just said the words because it was simple and I was in pain and I really didn’t think it could work.

He shrugs again. He doesn’t know either.

But you feel—

I nod.

Yes, I say. I do.

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