waiting for the punishment
on living on the same planet as someone who caused you irreparable harm, and who gets to tell the story
Hello! I am Lauren McQuistin, a musician, the author of No Lost Causes Club and the creator behind @brutalrecovery. I write about recovery not as a before and after, but as an ongoing process of imperfectly growing up and learning what we missed the first time around.
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Forgiveness is difficult to write about because it is one of those words that carries a different meaning for everyone. Like God or addiction or grace, there are as many ways to understand it as there are people who experience it, and no correct way - simply the one that is relevant and useful to that person. It’s one of those things where it’s impossible to not be misunderstood when you talk about it, because for everyone who understands it as to ‘let go’, because forgiveness is for you and not the other person, there is someone who feels that is letting someone off the hook, or not practicing true humility. For everyone who believes that to accept what happened doesn’t make what they did acceptable, there’s an argument for spiritual bypassing - and then an argument about that.
Like how I only discuss conflicts over the phone and in person, as opposed to email or text (a personal choice that works for me) I do not discuss huge principles like forgiveness in shortform paragraphs. It’s more interesting to have those conversations interactively, to understand another person’s experience, investigate my own and realise it is a non-linear process that gets tied up in a lot of semantics. The act of forgiveness takes many forms, and covers many situations, with different contexts and currents through them. It can get complicated before it gets simple, or simple, before it gets complicated.
But if I were to give it a paragraph, forgiveness for me is accepting the plain reality that people are who they are and did what they did, then moving on in a way that feels appropriate. Within that I try to let go of grievances, and deal with the consequences. Usually an argument about the meaning of justice follows. In small cases, I find it useful to practice ‘instant-forgiveness’ because the world is enormous and full of people who cannot read my mind. For certain situations, like abuse, I have not reached such a place.
I have a lot of life left to live before I will, god willing, become wise. But one thing I do know about myself is that I like to meander around a point before I talk about the thing that my heart wants me to write about. Perhaps it’s appropriate that I have started this piece with three paragraphs of ‘please don’t let me be misunderstood’ and ‘please don’t tell me I’m trouble for saying this wrong’, two fears that sit on the same bench as ‘please believe me.’ These tugs upon fear can feel slightly more urgent for adults who have experienced abuse.
They’re the alarm bells that I contend with when I write about abuse. I sometimes feel like I have to write a preamble of ‘please know that I am ok now, you don’t need to worry about me.’ or ‘please know it wasn’t my parents, but I can’t tell you who it was.’ Now that I’m no longer in a place of self-blame or shame I no longer feel the need to convince people I didn’t deserve it, but I still feel the insecurity of ‘please know that I’m not doing this out of revenge or self-obsession, I just know there are so many people out there who google their abuser’s name and ‘obituary’ to check if they are safe now.’