I try to make forgiveness a daily habit. Jesus pretty strongly implies that if we want God to forgive us, we have to forgive each other. I figure that's a fair trade. I'd much rather be forgiven myself than hold a grudge against anyone. I'm an agnostic leaning heavily toward faithful and obedient either way, but even if you're completely an atheist, there's still someone you want forgiveness from, even if it's just yourself, and it's not equitable for anyone to expect forgiveness for themselves if they're not willing to do it for others.
Forgetting is another matter. I like to scribble. It also is a daily habit, whether I show it off to anyone or not. I like to write from my imagination, but I prefer to write from memory. That has its own rewards but its own challenges also. Some of it requires that I rub my fingers along old wounds and see if they're still wet to see if there's anything to write about.
The wet ones are what I make my stories from. I hover over them and observe how the flesh knits around the scar and pull at the sides to see if any bright red will flow. Some of my best stuff comes that way. Some of the things I can never, ever, ever show anyone comes that way too.
Some of the very best writers, particularly the Southern writers I obsess over, combine this method with imaginative writing and produce works like Sound and the Fury and Glass Menagerie. I'll never reach those heights, but I understand bits of the process they go through. It's very powerful, but it's also devastating. If you look at what happened to people like Faulkner and Williams and Hemmingway, by the time they're forty, this reopening of old wounds takes a toll. The blood loss starts to be evident in their everyday life and in their drinking.
There came a point in my life when I started to avoid drinking. There were so many people I loved that spent part of their lives getting drunk every day. I did too. There were entire years when I'd sit at the dark corner of the bar at Scrooges, drinking, and thinking. Remembering and drinking. Part of how I write is to sit quietly and turn the words over in my head, stacking them and cutting them until they start to resemble something I remember. There comes a point in the process where I'm ready to start putting it down on paper, so I'd pay my tab and thank Keough, the bartender, for the company and go on my way home where my computer was. She's Irish, and her husband is Cuban, so I think she understood.
Spending a lot of time remembering everything you ever did wrong, everything and everyone that ever hurt you, and turning it over and over in your mind, probably isn't a very healthy way to live. Everyone does it, though. At least the way I do it, there's something at the end to show for the time spent.
It creates a sort of everpresent sense of melancholy and dread that writers and poets, and artists can be known for. Sometimes it ends badly for them. Those are the famous ones. I think my obsession with forgiveness saves me from that, though. I may spend the day wondering why someone would do a terrible thing to me, but it always ends with me forgiving them for it, and that softens the ache.
I can't really posit writing a healthy activity, especially as a daily habit. I've seen it wreck some beautiful people. Today, young writers celebrate the melancholy of a Sylvia Plath or an Emily Dickinson without really considering what it did to them as people. Poor John Kennedy Toole never even got to see any of his works published before the writing process burst all the sutures he made for himself, and he expired by his own hand, younger than Jesus was when he died.
What I can say is that keeping your sanity while you write requires a generous helping of self-forgiveness. There will be times when you spend the entire day saying, "why, why, why," where only admitting you did your best and forgiveness will keep the water from your eyes. If I love you, and I do love you, then I cannot recommend this path for you. The pain of life feeds it, and you develop something of an addiction to it. But, if you love me, and I hope you do, I can tell you I am safe. I'm in no danger of ending up like Toole or Hemmingway, or Plath. There will be days when it doesn't seem so, but I've gotten pretty good at forgiving myself.
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