How did you learn to forgive yourself? This is a problem I’ve always had, too.
Not gonna lie… a little bit of therapy. And this gon sound corny and obvious but the main work was actually going to the people I had been holding on to guilt for shit I did and making a sincere apology…
Just to find out that those things I had been holding on to, they wasn’t even trippin off that shit because it had been so long and they had long since moved on.
Some of em didn’t even remember the shit I did that I felt so bad about
Some of the shit, once you say it out loud you realize how ridiculous it is that you even felt guilty about it in the first place.
Like for me… my biggest thing was feeling like a burden on other people. So much shit I suffered in silence and handled on my own that I didn’t have to. To the point that after the fact people would get angry at me like “Why you just ain’t come to me, I had that or I would’ve helped, no question as much as you did for me.”
And I was actually able to go back and figure out the genesis of that feeling.
When my parents divorced I was like 6 or 7 years old. All the kids went with my father. Single man, working for the post office with 4 kids on his own plus a lot of times lookin out for other kids in the neighborhood who’s father s weren’t there.
Obviously not a lot of money but pops did his best to make it feel like we wasn’t broke. But I remember the first time I really felt it. He was dropping us off at school, and I remember checking my lunch bag because it felt light as shit, all I had was the sandwich and I was tight af.
It was like that for all of us but just that one time I was the one who complained. I seen the look in my dad eyes, and I ain’t never seen him look sad like that before… man always been like Superman in my eyes.
He was like “I’m sorry lil man, money kinda short right now, all I got is this banana, for myself.”
We get to school, I’m gettin out the car and he give me his banana. Lunch time come around and I eat my sandwich, but the banana got a brown spot, so I threw that shit away. I was fine for the rest of the day, but damn near every time after that when I felt like we ain’t have enough, I remember my dads face and that GODDAMN BANANA, which would’ve been all pops had to eat that day, that I fuckin threw away… for the next 30 goddamn years that fucking banana made me feel bad about begging.
To this day I dont ask my parents for shit even knowing he would give me his last. Seeing how he helped my other siblings all the time, I just wouldn’t the one ever again. He always told me how proud he was that I always seemed to figure shit out on my own, but I never told him the fucked up ways I was gettin to it to not have to ask.
When I finally told my dad this story, about how bad I felt and why I never ask for help….
That nigga laughed so hard in my face. He didn’t even remember that. It was nothing for him to give me that. Grown ass man of course he gon give his kid that banana. Not even a big deal.
We had a good laugh. My stepbrother was lookin at me crazy. Finally saying out loud, how I made my life unnecessarily tougher because of my childhood guilt over that fucking banana.
