hareofhrair:

actualaster:

ship-of-fools:

patricia-taxxon:

patricia-taxxon:

patricia-taxxon:

the thing is, if your younger self was a bigot or an abuser, u can’t make people forgive you. but you still gotta forgive yourself, like that’s non-negotiable, dude. that happens before u can even ask the question of earning forgiveness from anyone lese

oops, in your attempt to martyr yourself out of respect for your victims you accidentally sabotaged your own ability to conceptualize yourself as anything but a perpetual evildoer who is always one bad day away from hurting everyone you love, all but guaranteeing history to repeat itself. rookie mistake

im gonna try explaining myself, cus im a gambling addict and im waiting for the day that it actually works.

“forgiveness” is personal, that’s why I said in the post that you might inflict harm on people for which they can never forgive you, but that’s their quest. if you abuse someone, you can’t go no-contact with yourself. you actually keep living in your own head indefinitely, and ultimately you need to learn to live with yourself in order to continue living a full life without further harm. this is not necessarily an anti-carceral thought, although i am generally anti-carceral myself. I simply want people to like, fix their heart and atone for real with measured accountability & self love instead of dissociating, self-marking themselves forever and guaranteeing their recidivism.

You and a remorseful abuser would both think I’m giving the easy, coddling path. It’s actually the tough pragmatic path in disguise.

The kinds of people who argue once you abuse somebody you can never, ever change and grow past it and stop being abusive are almost 100% of the time people who will contort themselves into intricate knots in an effort to justify any and all harm they cause to anyone else in order to make sure they never have to come to terms with the fact that they’re equally capable of being abusive to others (and in a not insignificant number of instances I’ve seen people who do this be abusers themselves but they’ve convinced themselves their victims deserved it so they’re still morally pure).

If you’ve decided anyone who’s ever done wrong is irredeemable garbage always and forever, it gets a lot harder to admit when you’ve done wrong.

You know that thing some adults do, where a kid comes to them for help because the kid fucked up and knows it and needs help to fix it, and in response the adult flips out and screams at them and punishes them? And the result is that kid never goes to them for help again, and also would rather die than admit they fucked up?

Sometimes, you are both the parent and the child in that scenario.

If you fuck up, and you reflect on what you did and know it was wrong, but then instead of working on a way to fix it you just berate and punish yourself forever, all you’re doing is training yourself to never reflect and never admit you were wrong.

Don’t fuckin do that, it’s stupid.

Sometimes, you are both

the parent and the child in

that scenario.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.