The Strange and Unusual Afterlife of Self-forgiveness

For much of my life, my brain would do this thing where it would make a quick jump to thoughts of self-annihilation whenever I sensed abandonment. It seldom happens anymore, mostly because I have made a point in recent years to cull out vampiric friendships and be hyper-selective about who I trust. It also doesn’t hurt that I have reduced my level of expectations for human behavior to a misanthropic low. And I probably can’t discount the fact that, besides not really trusting anyone, I’m otherwise healthier overall than I’ve ever been.

Even so, if I’m in A Mood®, I’ve noticed the familiar beastie can still find a way to emerge from obscurity and rear its old, ugly head. But what’s different about my encounters with the self-annihilation beastie these days is that I understand it a lot better. Over the past two years — years that I’ve come to think of as my long and overdue convalescence from pretty much all the years prior — I’ve spent a lot of time trying not just to get stable and whole for the first time, but also to understand where my brain and body’s learned associations come from and what triggers my self-sabotaging behaviors of yore. There’s a lot about my brand of internalized self-loathing that’s still deeply mysterious to me, but the Rilke approach of trying to love the questions (or at least giving them some overdue attention) has yielded small, incremental revelations here and there.

For example, I can tell now that the association between abandonment and self-annihilation — at least the emotional aspect of it — started forming for me as early as second grade. That was when I remember fashioning an entry in my school journal after Lydia Deetz’s suicide note in Beetlejuice. It’s not as though I’d been actively left to die by anybody at that time, but I think I felt a kinship with the self-described “strange and unusual” Lydia, and mimicking her missive was my way of trying to articulate the overwhelming sense of loneliness that I didn’t understand or know how to live with. The result of the effort was read by my teacher and quickly passed on to our school counselor, who didn’t provide much in the way of help when she confronted me about it (and it did feel like a confrontation where I had to explain myself). But I don’t hold any of that against that counselor. I don’t know how equipped public schools are to help suicidal seven-year-olds nowadays and this was back in the 2000-01 school year.

The upshot of that whole episode was that I basically got the idea that I should keep my suicidality to myself because there wasn’t any helping it. Even if I were forthcoming about not wanting to be alive, I was still on my own. That was the signal I had gotten from adults anyhow. I think we’re all enlightened enough now to agree that that’s not the best way to handle a kid or anybody else in crisis, but I’m not so sure it was the worst. I think the one benefit of being downplayed instead of overblown in my case was that it forced me to figure out pretty early in life that I inhabited a harsh internal reality that I couldn’t necessarily expect to be validated. Ideally, there would’ve been somebody with more tools and life experience around to provide that nuanced validation so I didn’t have to suffer in isolation. But I still think what went down beats the holy hell out of an alternative corner of existence where adults catastrophize something like that and handle it like a ritual exorcism. Had that been my experience, I think I would’ve been in much deeper denial after the fact, when I’d inevitably have to find out that depression and suicidality aren’t one-and-dones or curable by an act of ceremony.

That whole abandonment/self-annihilation association was more properly consummated when I was in fifth grade. By the end of March 2004, I was vaguely aware that my mother was in the final stages of getting herself, my sister, and me out of the apartment we had shared with my dad for as long as I could remember. To be super clear, my parents were never hitched, only partnered with two kids. If I didn’t come across so many people who try to project the divorce narrative onto my upbringing, this wouldn’t feel necessary to say. But it’s kind of dawned on me how much of an erasure it is to not be seen for what I am — a grubby bastard child — and I will not stand for that anymore. For anybody who’s ever tried to slot me in the “child of divorce” narrative, I wish to be recognized only as the bastard that I am going forward, thank you very much.

Now, as I was saying about the old apartment, I had some sense that our days there were numbered (that unit was located along the inauspicious right of way in Gardiner known colloquially as Dogshit Alley, by the way). However, I didn’t think the transition was as imminent as it turned out to be. My mother, a criminally early riser who has always left home for her day job well before dawn, briefly came home from work one morning before my sister and I left for school to show us an apartment we’d be moving into. For whatever reason, I missed the lede that that’s where we’d be sleeping beginning that night.

To make matters more complicated, I left that afternoon with a kid in the grade above me and her parents for a spelling bee in Livingston. Since that family lived out in the valley between Gardiner and Livingston, I remained with them until they headed back into Gardiner for an event at a church that evening that we were both attending. On a typical day, my mom probably would’ve been able to get a hold of me and tell me to head to the apartment we had seen that morning. But I don’t think she had anticipated the transition being compressed to a single day, and because I was gone until evening, no such message made it to me. So I did what I had done at the end of most every day of my life up to that point. I walked back to the Dogshit Alley apartment, but only to find the door locked and all the lights out.

I don’t have much in the way of linear memory of the night beyond that point, which makes sense in hindsight, since I understand now that this has all the hallmarks of a traumatic experience for a child. But I must have pulled it together enough to determine my only recourse was to walk back across the bridge that goes over the Yellowstone River and hope that I caught somebody leaving the event I had just been at before everyone was gone.

By that age, I had some awareness that people had died falling from the bridge in my hometown — never jumping. For whatever reason, the prevailing lore my mom had passed on to me was that everyone who had jumped from the bridge in an attempted suicide had been badly injured, but ultimately made it. Only the ones who had fallen in what had been chalked up to accidents by local authorities had perished. I don’t know how categorically true that is, but it certainly held up for the bridge death that occurred just shy of two full years later when I was in seventh grade. However, what seems to be the best predictor of a person’s fate has less to do with intent than time of year. Regardless of how you drop or where you land, the surface is far rockier in the winter when the water level is lowest. The higher water of spring and summer, on the other hand, tends to be more forgiving.

It’s hard to know how much serious thought I gave at the tender age of 11 to jumping plummeting off the bridge on my second trip across it that night, but I do know I thought about it and I am confident the underlying logic was that if I weren’t wanted anywhere and had been forgotten or consciously abandoned, I’d be doing everyone a solid by bowing out sooner rather than later. I’m sure it reinforced — in a way more concrete to my young mind than the missive lifted from Beetlejuice when I was in second grade — the companionship between perceived abandonment and self-annihilation that was already a fixture in my emotional experience, even if I weren’t prepared to act on it.

Again, with this whole sequence lacking any kind of linearity in my memory, I don’t know how or when it occurred to me to check the apartment that my mother had shown us that morning, but it eventually did and that’s ultimately where I found my mom and sister — neither of whom were in any state to help me beyond the basics after what I know now was a traumatizing 12+ hours for both of them as well. So while I was lucky and had safely landed where I did that night on my second try, I do think it drove home what I had already internalized a few years prior: Reckoning with internal pain was a solitary endeavor.

The notion that suicidality shouldn’t be contended with publicly is obviously not something I subscribe to at all as an adult. If anything, it may well be the topic that most predominates conversations with my ride-or-dies. And while I do think there is a fine line between honesty and centering something such that we inadvertently retraumatize and re-victimize ourselves daily, I think the ubiquity of suicide as a topic in conversations with people I trust and respect most is extremely healthy for at least two reasons.

First: I’m a big proponent of the “Dark Don’t Hide It” ethos of Jason Molina. As a rule, having things out in the open and knowing where you stand with yourself and other people — even and especially if it’s on their shit list — is always far preferable to performative politeness and good cheer in my book. In the same way, I’m of the mind that duping people into thinking things are hunky dory when they are summarily not serves nobody — least of all ourselves. That’s performative too, and beyond that, I think misleading each other in that way is an erasure of emotional truth, which I count as a form of violence.

Second: I think the consistency of externalizing something so internal as suicidality is a way of continuing to remind me that so many of us have learned to live with this beastie. Sometimes, we’re lucky enough to go stretches without having it rear its head at full bore, but it never really goes out from us. I think it’s pretty moving that so many of us carry on in the face of an ever-present predilection for self-annihilation. Getting to know who some of those people are appeals deeply to my sense of solidarity. And I only find it more grounding that all my favorite people — the friends, artists, and manifesters I most admire, almost without exception — contend with this beastie throughout their lives.

There are a few images and ideas I recently came across in the poetry collection Horsefly Dress by Heather Cahoon that I’ve been thinking about in this context. Throughout the collection, there are a handful of poems in italics that are about or inspired by dreams. The last of the five to appear is called “A Dream of a Darling Boy” and its final several lines about the eponymous boy in the dream are worth citing in full:

… Why is he all alone? It is winter why
is he not properly dressed? And why does he not seem to mind the
cold? I wonder as I glance down at his feet frostbitten freezer-burned
flesh dry and cracking each toe the whole foot and ankles eating its
way up his small legs. He smiles at me but keeps a safe distance this
little boy who earlier I described as darling who, on second thought,
is more accurately described as daring, kʷtispúʔu:  he dares to be.

In the back of Horsefly Dress is a glossary of the Salish words that appear in Cahoon’s poems. And while there’s some context in the way kʷtispúʔu is invoked in “A Dream of a Darling Boy,” I was pretty stirred by this short definition provided in the glossary: “Brave; literally ‘big heart’”

This darling/daring boy of Cahoon’s poem feels akin to so many of the walking wounded among us. The folks I know with the biggest wounds also have the biggest hearts. I don’t know enough about anatomy to know if I’m blowing right past a more elegant metaphor there. But I have my own theories on the correlation. For so many of us, I think there’s something about our defining wounds — our original wounds, I suppose — that leaves us determined to reduce harm and carry on without perpetuating our own trauma.

I often describe myself as an empath with abandonment issues, and most people who’ve had to work or correspond with me on a consistent basis in the past two years have probably heard me say that whenever they try to tell me how much they appreciate how proactive and specific I am in the way I communicate — particularly when it comes to appointments, deadlines, and practical shit. To some extent, explaining it is my way of deflecting praise, but it’s much more about contextualizing that which people are so quick to laud. To me, it’s essential to have a clear sense of people’s expectations and to be very precise about what I’m able to do for them because, insofar as I can prevent it, I never want to be the person that triggers somebody else’s abandonment response if it’s anything like mine.

I think people are tempted to interpret it as an innate virtue of mine, and I guess it’s important to me that they know it isn’t and that I don’t even feel like I can take credit for it. The way that I am now largely comes from a deep sense of responsibility born of a formative wound. It reminds me of this element in everyone’s natal chart called Chiron, or the wounded healer. It obviously lands in a different sign depending on when you were born, but it’s taken to represent the deep-rooted trauma and programming accumulated through the first seven years of your life. The general wisdom around Chiron is that once you understand your formative wound, everyone has the potential to learn from it and help others heal through their own healing. It’s a beautiful concept and I’m a big-time believer in the evolutionary power of our more painful experiences. But I’m learning that feeling such a responsibility to prevent harm and rebuild yourself from ruin can be a heavy burden.

Recently, I was talking on the phone with one of my ride-or-dies, and said something about the important evolutionary value that feelings like regret, guilt, and shame have had for me. She pressed me on what I meant when I referred to “shame” and pointed out something really important about it. Namely, shame is almost exclusively constructed. And this friend wisely noted that, for most of us, our formative experiences with shame generally come from a value system that’s imposed on us and kind of meant to control behavior and not necessarily make us better, freer, or more enlightened people.

That was kind of an epiphany for me, and it actually made me realize that a lot of the shame I identify with is retroactive. That is, it’s based on my values now. I’m basically ashamed of a past version of myself, the possible harm I did to other people when I was young and injured, and all the things I think I’m never going to live down. When I was able to verbalize that, the same friend dropped yet another two-ton machete of compassionate insight, saying that with that kind of stuff, we really need to practice self-forgiveness.

In the weeks since that conversation, it’s kind of clicked for me how much of a double-standard there is in my expectations of myself and my aforementioned misanthropically low expectations of others. It’s also slowly dawned on me how much hubris there is in being so fixated on things I did in the past because I’m paranoid I wrought an outsized amount of harm that has done lasting damage. And it’s begun to make me wonder how much of my regret, shame, and guilt is kind of about my own ego. What is it about those past versions of me that I still feel so responsible for? Why am I so fixated on those old versions that I’m forever telepathically apologizing for all the damage they might’ve done, when I’m likely the only one who remembers any of it?

I’m starting to think there is significance in being that last person who remembers — the last surviving eyewitness of our past regrets, as it were. To my friend’s point about self-forgiveness, I’m starting to think that maybe being the custodian for a memory of a feeling is the cosmic signal that the ball’s in our court. That, essentially, we have the sole power to offer that past version of ourselves the proper release of self-forgiveness. After all, once regret has fulfilled its evolutionary function, once it’s changed our values and influenced the way we move forward, I guess it’s done all it can do besides haunt us.

It’s uncanny that immediately after reading Heather Cahoon’s Horsefly Dress, I read Mark Gibbons’s collection Mostly Cloudy, and both touched on the singular quality of an act like forgiveness. In the final section of Cahoon’s poem “Scƛ’lil” (Salish for death), she equates forgiveness to “the most difficult death.” Just because that whole section kind of blew my wig back, here it is:

The most difficult death is forgiveness
a basket woven from reeds of resentment
and sorrow reworked into useful form.
It is the act of re-striking the delicate
balance between grievance and absolution
from perceived wrong actions or events,
those ephemeral instances that impart
lasting effects. May I realize this most
difficult death as a catalyst for life.

I remember reading that and thinking she’s so right about forgiveness as, at once, the most difficult death and a catalyst for life. Unlike most forms of death or annihilation that come to my mind, forgiveness is voluntary. The will has to be there for it to happen, and there’s breathtaking irony to me in “will” being such an active concept — it’s alive and so full of agency. To me, it kind of feels like an extension of the will to live, a way of expressing some desire for a future. Cahoon already had me noodling on this concept that Gibbons ended up bringing home for me in the context of this self-forgiveness business that’s been trailing me for the past few weeks.

In this destroyer of an ending to his poem, “Summer Days,” Gibbons writes:

… Hearts
may break, but love remains

if we can forgive and love
ourselves. The world will follow
suit: a heart played calls for

a heart.   That’s the trick, letting go
allows love to flow in. Always
lead trump—and shoot the moon.

Maybe this sounds sophomoric, but I don’t know that anybody has ever spelled out for me that things like love and forgiveness start from within. At least not anybody who’s said it in a way that I could understand or would take seriously. The way Gibbons puts it, the onus really is on us to start the process with ourselves to effectively signal to the universe that we’re open for business — to be forgiven and to be loved. It seems fitting to me that here, as in Cahoon’s characterization, forgiveness is an act of will, and it really feels like these are all connected and reciprocal: will to live, will to forgive, will to love.

I guess what’s funny about all of this to me is that self-forgiveness is perhaps the form of self-annihilation I have the least familiarity and experience with. And yet, it’s the one we all stand to gain the most from. I think it’s just hard to fathom that an act of will, a practice, really — albeit a difficult kind — could be so transformative. And that none of that liberation has to come from external validation. In that way, it’s kind of a cool reversal of what I internalized from an early age about suffering. Believing that suffering had to occur in isolation was misguided. Believing that forgiveness could only be brokered by an external source was also misguided.

I mentioned earlier that a core tenet of my “Dark Don’t Hide It” ethos is knowing where I stand with people and being clear about where people stand with me. In that bit, I specifically invoked the concept of a shit list. I think part of the reason that I always thought forgiveness couldn’t be self-granted kind of goes back to this underlying hubris in thinking I’m probably on more than a few people’s lifetime shit lists.

What I’m getting at is that I used to always imagine forgiveness having to be a solicited, ceremonious exchange like in this Billy Madison scene that I think about way too often:

Much as it would be nice to track down all the Danny McGraths that I believe I’ve wronged, one by one, and tell them I’m sorry — whether they have any memory of my misdeeds or not — I feel like that fundamentally bypasses the restorative self-annihilation baked into the practice of self-forgiveness.

Something about needing other people’s forgiveness seems to make it about me still — about being tethered to an ego and identifying with it, about needing to be absolved by somebody else, about futilely trying to live something down, and basically about just being sorry for having existed in any prior form. I think we all tend to idle there when really all we can do once the feeling or memory has been reworked into useful form, to use Heather Cahoon’s words, is release it.

In all my years of being visited upon by the beastie of self-annihilation, I never imagined there was this whole other life-opening dimension of it. It feels like an afterlife. At that, maybe the only afterlife we should aim for during our spirits’ short stays in these human-shaped packets of dead star matter.

When I think of Chiron, the formative wound that supposedly portends how we heal ourselves and help others, it makes total sense to me that a higher and better form of self-annihilation — one that defies all my learned associations with it — is coming to the fore. And when I think about the veritable Pandora’s box of reciprocity and good vibes that we possibly open ourselves up to when we can learn to forgive and [gulps] love ourselves, it’s no wonder forgiveness is the most difficult death.

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P.S. My copies of Horsefly Dress and Mostly Cloudy came from Fact and Fiction in Missoula and so can yours.

P.P.S. For whoever’s counting, I did two-thirds of the honors, but if you wish to properly summon the ghost with the most, it’s all up to you now.