#magdrama

[natatangingtangangsandali]

Pag-ibig na hindi atin

Heto ako nakahiga

tila nasa kalawakan

laging nagmumuni-muni

kung bakit ko ba nagawa

ang paniwalain ka lang

sa isang pagkakamaling 

hindi mo dapat natanggap

Heto ako nakahiga

parang walang kaayusan

sapagkat sanay maghintay

ng kapalarang sa iyo

ko na lamang makakamtan

nawa’y iyong patawarin

mahal, ‘di ko sinasadya

ang ikaw ay paasahin 

sa pag-ibig na ‘di atin. 

[darkandtwistyraya]

How To Forgive Yourself

Forgiveness is not a thing we approach while it’s alive and beside us, but it should be. We otherwise spend lifetimes not forgiving because we can convince ourselves it’s what’s just. That to be a self-actualized and aware adult, we need to delineate “good” from “bad,” and not overlook a transgression, lest we be permitting it.

But not every failure is a transgression against your person. Not every act is committed out of a place of malicious intent — in fact, few are. Failures are re-directs, wrongdoings often reflections of the unhealed parts of us. When we don’t take the signals to change, and don’t see these things as feedback, we end up forgetting that we’re allowed of our humanness. We are not required to be perfect, we are required to try — not for perfection, but for healing, for being as wholly ourselves as we can be. Perfect is someone else’s idea of who we should be, and we don’t have to punish ourselves for not being it.

We expect many things of ourselves, and of other people, by the very virtue of giving them titles. Our parents are supposed to provide for us, and they’re not supposed to be so swooped up in their own issues, angers, trials, that they cannot. And when these concepts we have of how life should look fall short, we punish ourselves. For not being good enough children. For not being good enough people. We act out of necessity, most of the time. The moments in my life that I can recall being cruel to someone else, being cruel to myself, I was not coming from a place of logic. I was coming from a place of deep, wounding pain, and I had to do whatever I had to do to get out of it.

But punishing doesn’t heal.

I learned that the hard way, as I beat myself against a brick wall, torturing myself by making myself my hardest, most unrelenting critic. But it didn’t make me better. It didn’t make me try harder. It made me more convinced I could not do that which I wanted to. It made me more skeptical that I was even worthy of it. It was bulleting a ship until it slowly sank.

Forgiving myself — for my imperfections and for this — had nothing to do with being okay that I had failed, but overturning the ideas on which I thought I was failing. It wasn’t judging the action, it was analyzing why I chose to make it. It wasn’t re-living the darkest moments of my life on repeat, it was tapping into why I felt the way I did, and arriving at that place of more innate understanding is what changed me. At that place, forgiveness seems almost inevitable. You don’t torture yourself for justice, you change yourself for it.

Forgiveness is something we give to ourselves before anybody else. It’s a one-sided conversation before it’s two. It’s the simple allowing of a flawed humanness, and the complex commitment to growing — not out of fear and guilt, but love. And it’s something you do before it’s too late, it’s something you give before you don’t have the chance to get in return.

[tsinituh]

Bat ganto? Biglang nagbago? Bat umiiwas ka sakin? Kala ko ba walang iwanan. Bat pinaparamdam mo sakin na mag-isa nalang ako? Bat iniwan mo ko? Sabi mo dyan ka lang palagi pag may problema ako? Diba sabi mo pa nga pwede akong umiyak sayo? Sabi mo lagi kang nandyan para sakin? Pero bakit... bakit iniwan mo kong nag-iisa? Umiiyak ng dahil sayo. Umiiyak dahil sa pag-iwas mo? Di na ba pwedeng ibalik yung dating tayo? Yung dating ikaw? Please naman oh, hirap na hirap na ko. Akala ko di mo ko iiwan. Nagpromise ka pa nga diba? Hindi mo na ba kayang tuparin yun?