Forgiveness is a gift we give ourselves as much as the one who wronged us. It is not forgetting, and it is not pretending that the pain never happened. It is the quiet, trembling decision to stop letting that pain define us. To stop bleeding from a wound that is no longer being cut.

I used to carry anger like a stone in my chest - hard, cold, and unrelenting. I held it tightly, believing it protected me from being hurt again. But in truth, it weighed me down. I dragged it into every room, every relationship, every moment. It shaped how I saw others, how I spoke, how I breathed. Bitterness became a second skin - familiar, but suffocating.

I told myself that my anger was justified. That I had the right to hold on. And maybe I did. But over time, I realized something unbearable: the one who hurt me had long moved on, while I was the one still living in the ruins. I had built my own prison, brick by bitter brick.

Then, quietly - so quietly - I began to hear a whisper beneath all the noise: you can let go now. It wasn't a grand epiphany. It was more like a soft breaking. A moment of stillness in which I felt the depth of my exhaustion. I was tired of being angry. Tired of carrying a pain that no longer served me. Tired of holding my heart in a clenched fist.

Forgiveness didn't happen all at once. It was a slow, raw unraveling. It meant returning to the places that hurt, sitting with the memories that still made me flinch, and breathing through them instead of pushing them away. There were days I cried without knowing why. Nights I prayed for peace and only found silence. But I kept showing up. I kept choosing not to harden.

And then, one day, I noticed something had changed. I could speak their name without choking. I could remember what happened and not feel like I was drowning. I had released something heavy - and in doing so, I had made space inside myself for light.

Forgiveness didn't make what happened okay. It didn't erase the scars. But it gave me back my freedom. It gave me back my voice. And maybe most powerfully, it gave me back my softness - the part of me I thought I had to lose in order to survive.

To forgive is not to be weak. It is the most profound strength. To feel everything, to walk through the fire, and still choose love - not for the other person, but for yourself.

That is the true gift. That is healing.