The upside of down.

Ron and I were having ice cream and a really deep conversation tonight. He asked me, at perhaps the most important point of the chat, if I ever forgave myself for things that I believe I've done wrong.

I said no. My memory is long, yet I know I generally, if at all, don't forgive myself.

I apologize to other people. Other people garner my regard and my concern more often than I give it to myself.

With myself, have I ever gone back and told myself that it's all right to have made mistakes?

Reading this, I'm guessing, all sounds terribly self-indulgent. But I honestly can't recall the last time I thought I could actually let a mistake go.

Is there a difference between becoming the sum of all your actions rather than the result of all your personally-held errors?

How do you even go about forgiving yourself?

I, for one, am not entirely sure. Which is probably a good place to start.

But where do I go from there? And if I started denoting memories to forgive, where do I start?

When I was in daycare, I once hit this girl named Jodi in the face because I thought she was being mean to me. Years later, when she was my hairdresser and I was in college, I apologized to her immediately upon realizing who she was. She, of course, didn't remember the slap, but she remembered me being a nice friend of hers in daycare.

She forgot it. I didn't. To her, it ended. To me, it became a part of me. After I'd hit someone, I became, in the resume in my head, a person capable of hitting someone.

I'm digging too deeply. But that's my point.

Right now, I'm the sum of my errors and faults moreso than I am the person who learned from my errors.

How do you change that perspective?

To go darker, I'll admit something.

In my head, I'm more the boy who enjoyed and encouraged sexual activity he knew was wrong with a family member than I am someone who was abused. I feel guilty for the times I sought it out, asked for it.

I remember clearly the doubt I felt about my own role in what was happening to me, admitting to myself that he wasn't hurting me or endangering me moreso than I was doing it to myself, allowing myself to be hurt. If he was hurting me, that I could understand because it was easy to see him as "bad." But if I was letting it happen or asking him to do it or enjoying aspects of it, how could I be "good" or "the victim?"

If I knew what I was doing was wrong, why didn't I stop it?

I can't answer that. I can't easily pass blame for that or accept blame for it. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I wasn't strong. But I wasn't passive. And I wasn't a victim nor distinctly NOT a victim.

It still doesn't make any sense to me.

It's easier to just not think about it, to let it exist inside me without dealing with it and instead letting it slowly creep into who I am to myself and how I deal with people.

In therapy, I build up who I am in spite of what happened. I build up my confidence in spite of what happened. I am someone now in spite of what happened. I am formidable, capable, accomplished, surviving now in spite of what happened.

But I don't deal with how I feel about what happened. Not directly. How I feel about myself and who I was for allowing it to happen to me.

In therapy, if I end up in that place where I have to deal with that solid little dark pit of a thing at the center of all I am, there's nothing I can do but move past it and concentrate on the now.

I feel like there's little way to stop it - and a million other little unforgiven errors - from seeping into who I've become.

When Ron mentioned whether I forgive myself for my own errors, my thoughts went immediately to the core one. The thing I don't forgive myself for. The thing that makes me doubt love a little, disregard myself a little and think I'll be a little more inclined to fail when called to act.

Telling that counselor about the abuse was supposed to give me the courage to stop it. She told me that I could fight the urge, say no to him when it was presented to me in my house, while my parents were out.

But I didn't stop it. I did it one last time, knowing that I shouldn't and didn't have to. Part of me wanted to mess around with him, even though I couldn't figure out why I couldn't stop myself.

So it happened with him. And I got my clothes on, ran outside, jumped in the car and drove to my circle. And the next morning, I walked around a mall in a haze and thought about jumping off the balcony.

But I didn't.

I fear I'm never going to write a book, by the way. Or leave the latest job I hate. Or try harder. Or move faster. Or do better.

Some part of me, knowing what's wrong and bad, does the bad thing anyway.

How do you fix that kind of behavior? How do you start?

Learn from your mistakes. Forgive yourself. Let things go.

Is this ever going to stop haunting me? Do you get the albatross off your neck or just learn how to live with it?

It's apparently not enough to have survived it. Now I have to forgive myself. And take care of myself. And let this fade. And let the good people in. And write a book. And expose myself to the bright possibilities in life. And move on.

But I don't know how to forgive myself this.

The people who "find religion" I think are lucky if they really believe it. For me, outer forgiveness was empty, something that was easy to ask for. Inner forgiveness, after knowing my role in what happened to me, has been the hardest part. Inner forgiveness has allowed me to push away anything else, reject anything else.

It's easier to seek the approval of others than it is to face what I let happen to me.

This is so huge, and there are other things to do. Things that are easier to do, like paying bills or making goal numbers at my small, little job or buying a new poster and putting it in a frame.

I didn't mean to write so much about this. I didn't even know that I thought this much about it, to be honest.

I'll call my therapist in the morning. I'm going to go read a book.