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The Anti-Forgiveness Mantra
Does forgiveness really need to be part of our lives?
Repeat after me:
I don’t owe anyone forgiveness.
No one has the right to demand my forgiveness.
I do not need to forgive anyone for a damn thing.
Demands for forgiveness disrespect my autonomy.
Requests for forgiveness are attempts at manipulation.
Forgiveness is not required. Ever.
I am anti-forgiveness. Forgiveness was not a core concept in my upbringing, so everything I knew came from the societal narrative. I learned about it by watching other families, friends, classmates with the occasional performative apology and forgiveness forced by relatives. It wasn’t something I began interrogating until I was navigating my own interpersonal relationships as an adult when the choice of whether or not to grant it was fully mine.
I chose to be unforgiving.
It wasn’t a difficult choice for me. I’d been aware of the bullshit nature of apologies since childhood and was capable of discerning whether an apology was sincere or just a tool to shame me into silence. Who hasn’t had someone say that once you forgave them, you had to let the incident go? Who hasn’t been chastised for…