For years, I used to dream of killing my rapist. My anger threatened to consume everything. When friends and family would try to offer comfort by imploring me to “forgive,” I became so enraged that I would cut them out of my life for days, weeks, months.

Yesterday was international forgiveness day so I wanted to write a post about the concept of “forgiveness” but I find that I am stuck. I am mainly stuck because I am reluctant to share my own personal journey in learning to forgive someone who did me great harm while I was still a teenager.

I have spent the past 25 years thinking about “forgiveness” in one form or another. My journey to “forgiveness” was a long hard slog. Looking back now, it is clear to me that my obstacle to forgiveness was that my perpetrator never offered an apology or acknowledgement of the harm that he caused. I wanted my suffering to be recognized. I wanted an apology. I never got one.

Apologies, sincere ones, are underrated. True apologies are acts of courage and humility because they put the person who is offering the apology at great risk. The person who apologizes must do so without knowing whether it will be accepted. In our society, he/she also risks being “punished” if they acknowledge that they have done something wrong or caused harm.

I have spent all of the years since my assault thinking about how we can condemn harm and seek accountability while caring for the person who caused it. This is important to me because we will never ever “bring to justice” every person who does harm in our society. It is impossible. Relying on the criminal legal system to provide “justice” or repair harm is a fool’s errand. We cannot under any system “prosecute” every perpetrator. Yet many survivors and victims become obsessed with seeking “accountability” through a system that simply cannot provide it.

What getting to forgiveness provided me was a way to release my pain. It offered a process through which I could acknowledge what happened to me without remaining trapped in the anger and hurt of the assault. Martin Luther King said: “We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love.” That quote really resonated for me. While I was plotting my revenge, I had closed off my heart. I could only feel anger, fear, and deep debilitating sadness. I could not give or receive love. I was slowly killing my self. Quite literally, I had to forgive to save my self. It was a profoundly selfish act. It has been written that “to forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.” This was certainly the case in my life.

I have such compassion for people who have been harmed. It has become the singular purpose of my life to ensure that we find more humane and effective ways to provide true accountability for harm. I’ll end this post with some words that I found a few years ago. They have held up quite well over time. I hope that someone who is reading this today will find some solace in them:

“In a way, forgiving is only for the brave. It is for those people who are willing to confront their pain, accept themselves as permanently changed, and make difficult choices. Countless individuals are satisfied to go on resenting and hating people who wrong them. They stew in their own inner poisons and even contaminate those around them. Forgivers, on the other hand, are not content to be stuck in a quagmire. They reject the possibility that the rest of their lives will be determined by the unjust and injurious acts of another person.” – Gordon Dalbey – Letter to the Editor, The Christian Century (November 20-7, 1991)

Happy belated international forgiveness day to everyone!