Learning to Forgive Myself Was Harder Than Forgiving Anyone Else

The failure was professional and specific: at 24, in a role where I was responsible for a small team at a technology firm in Galway, I made a decision under pressure that I knew at the time was not quite right and made it anyway because the situation did not offer an easy route to the right choice.

The decision affected a colleague in a way that had real consequences for her and that I could not undo after the fact. I apologised. I was honest about what had happened. The professional situation resolved. The internal one did not.

I had carried, for two years afterward, a version of the failure that I replayed with a thoroughness that I had never applied to any other error. Not daily, but regularly enough to constitute an ongoing project of self-punishment that was serving no purpose by the second year except to provide a floor of ongoing self-condemnation that I had not consciously installed but was maintaining with considerable energy.

At 26, my therapist asked me something I had not been asked about this particular incident: if a close friend had made the same decision in the same situation, would I have forgiven them in two years? The answer was immediate and honest: I would have forgiven them within weeks.

The therapist's observation was equally immediate: the standard I was applying to myself was one I would have considered cruel if applied to anyone I loved. The work of extending to myself the standard I would extend to others was not about excusing what had happened.

It was about distinguishing between accountability, which I had discharged by acknowledging and addressing the failure honestly, and ongoing self-punishment, which was no longer accountability but was something else - a refusal to let myself be the kind of person who could make a mistake and continue rather than a person who made a mistake and was permanently defined by it.

The forgiveness, when it arrived, was quiet and not dramatic. It arrived as a stopping of the replay rather than any grand absolution. At 30 I remember what happened. I am not still punishing myself for it.