Forgiveness is a gift. Try to give it to yourself!

Forgiveness has something to do with moving forward. Once you're ready to forgive, you are ready to move forward.

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I've seen married couple divorced, families get broken, and friendships ended. I've crossed their paths more than once in my life. I've seen how anger had taken up so much of the supposed happy years of their lives. And I can't help but wonder about the common grounds of these unsatisfied people. Was it money, was it love, was it health or was it approval? When I came to my senses and examined myself, I found out, I am one of those unhappy people. So I started interrogating myself what went wrong, why do I seem so unhappy?

There's so much things from my past that I guess had contributed and worsen my emotional stability. One of which is my constant need of approval and appreciation. I wanted the spotlight. I wanted to be recognized. I wanted to get what I want. But failures are inevitable. Because while I thought I deserved to win, somebody else worked hard to deserve it more than I do. But I did not see it that way before. So, I grew up blaming myself for being not good enough.

And it worsen when I hit puberty. There were so much changes and I cannot almost cope up with it. It came to the point that I was able to hurt others for not being able to control my emotions. But the truth is, I was not mad at them; I was mad at myself. I wanted to be someone I am not because I thought no one wanted a failure and I thought I was a failure. I kept on comparing myself to other people, my friends and even my siblings. I grew so much mad that years passed by I almost lost the ability to trace back where it all came from. So I kept being mad. It was those times when I'd happen to had several anxiety attacks. And not long enough after, I found myself seeing a counselor and then later on a Psychiatrist.

For the first few months, I tried to please my counselor. I acted as if things were pretty much normal. But based on several tests, she revealed to me that my behavior are on extremes. I was not quite sure if I understood that during that time. But I was quick on thinking to use my disadvantage to act even more unreasonable. And when I saw enough people I bled on - people who did not cut me - I was as if electrified back to my senses. I looked for more means of emotional help and stumbled upon one of the very best psychiatrists in the country, one who worked in National Center for Mental Health. She was pretty cool on me. And I did my best to be as honest as possible despite of the fact that I was too ashamed to admit everything I did in the past. But I did become honest which made me a little more comfortable. She gave me advice along with prescriptions. And one of her advice was to always write a journal and read a book entitled, "Purpose Driven Life".

I took a U-turn at my life to see how worse have I become over the past years. And each day I took notes on the significant memories I have in the past - one that is cheerful and one that is depressing. Each day I collected memories and each day I would stare blankly at nothing while my thoughts travel through the past. Some days, the recollected memories were too harsh to write and so it would take a couple of tears on the paper before actually replacing them with inked words. As I went with it, which was at first felt like a duty then later on became a habit, I found myself happy. I, like everyone else have pretty good things to reminisce about. I indeed was once the kind of friend you would want to chat with, the kind of sister you'd rely on and the kind of daughter you would be proud of. I was the kind of person I was aiming to be!!!

What happened in the past really was, all the guilt got piled up that I was no longer courageous to confess my mistakes. While several events in the past made other people to forgive me, I was not really paying attention to it. For me, it did not matter. Because whether they had forgiven me, I was not able to forgive myself!

It was the kind of realizations that took me long enough to finally process. I was only good at pleasing others to get the attention I want but I was not good at pleasing myself to be happy. And when all of that finally sank in, I went on to starting to forgive myself and to ask forgiveness from the people I hurt.

And as I put the broken pieces back together, I finally found the lost me! The one I kept searching for! The incident I kept blaming other people about! I finally was able to gather myself together and eventually forgave myself.

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This has been @nikkabomb saying, "Sometimes what you are desperately looking for is just at your reach. Stop guilt-tripping around and find peace within you. And if forgiveness is a gift, try to give it to yourself!"

Nikka Ganzan, the author

_{I was destined to be a successful civil engineer but my heart belongs to literature. And if I have learnt something from the past years of struggles, it is maybe this - "Sometimes a leap of faith is what you need in order to find happiness. Because if you are not to become a happy person, then what's the purpose of life then?".}

_{I tried working in an industry with the use of my maximum skills in my chosen field and I was earning big (bigger than what I expected), yet I was not happy. In between those times, I found deeper and stronger interest in my first and second love - writing and photography.}

_{And so here I am, in my little corner in the blockchain. I hope you had a good read and check out more here ---> @nikkabomb. Lovelots.}