What are you denying?
Here’s what I missed out on when I spent all those years choosing not to forgive and let go, choosing to hold on to resentment, and making myself the Victim of my past.
I missed how funny my mother is–hilarious, really—how she can come up with a perfectly timed comment that, reflected on years later, can still make me laugh.
By focusing only on the bad memories, I hid the good memories–of Valentine’s Day scavenger hunts, rainy day picnics in the back of a station wagon, summer Shakespeare in the park, the time she forced us to watch the PBS version of I, Claudius and how we got really into it, making up dance routines to Beatles songs, and watching Bob Ross paint “happy little trees” with “little bits of color.”
I forgot how cool she is; how she let me get my ears pierced, dye my hair, and how she stretched a tight budget to include one back to school item each year that was not purely practical. How she let me watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and how she danced the Time Warp in the kitchen, and how she taught me to jump to the left and step to the right.
In all that effort expended to make her into the one who had messed me up, I conveniently forgot all of the times she stood up for me, whether to that boss who made sexist comments or to teachers in school who were inappropriate or demoralizing.
Most of all, I denied acknowledgment of how ruthlessly she raised her daughter to stand up for herself in a world where women are not taught to have a voice by default.
No, wait–she did not simply teach me to have a voice. She taught me that I had a voice with things worth saying and worth hearing, and a god-damned right to speak my truth, regardless of what anyone said.
What greater gift can you give to a daughter in this world?
The gifts of forgiveness are not solely in the realization of one’s own power and choice.
They’re also in the realization that when we forgive, when we powerfully choose who we are, we free ourselves up to see all of who someone else is.
Then we’re fully free to receive all of the gifts they’ve got to offer, even the gifts that are twenty years in the past, and when that happens, there’s such an expansion of feeling…blessed. Nurtured. Cared for. Loved.
In essence, forgiveness has given me the experience of receiving from my mother what I wanted all along—her love—instead of focusing on what my Victim Story insisted that she wasn’t giving to me. I was denying it from coming into my life by clinging to the Story that she had messed me up. This is a Story that is patently untrue.
This begs the question: What are you denying?
Where is the thing that you want… also the thing that you are denying yourself?
I know–it’s tricky. This thing that I was denying was something that was so right under my nose, so obvious, so right there–and at the same time, my Story about my life was so, so, so, so very strong that I couldn’t see clearly.
This is the beautiful thing about expanding and seeing more–the question that opened one door for you can be used somewhere else.
If the question is “What are you denying?” it can just as easily be turned into an action step: “If it seems like I’m not receiving something, check for where I’m denying.”
Not enough money? Not enough time?
–Where are you denying something?
Feeling unloved? Feeling unwanted?
–Where are you denying something?
Experiencing frustration? Experiencing a sense of lack?
–Where are you denying something?
The experience of receiving is all about our choice to open our palms skyward rather than keep our fists clenched tight.
In my experience, life feels better when I look for where—any place, any small tidbit—something is present, than focusing on where it is not present.
I keep thinking that life is too damned short for us to keep spinning solely in the unjustness of it all, the hardships, the places where we lack. I’m not saying that we should pretend that there isn’t discomfort or pain when things are hard or unjust or lacking—I’m saying that when we spin there, over and over, keeping our focus there, we deny the good. We make it harder to see the good. And life is too short to just not see the good that’s right there.