Her therapist suggested it. Write to the person who hurt you. You don’t have to send it. Just write it.
She wrote four pages. She burned them in the kitchen sink.
Two weeks later, she wrote another letter. Shorter this time. She burned that one too.
She has written and burned eleven letters over two years. She doesn’t know if she’s getting closer to forgiveness or just getting better at writing the letters. She’s not sure there’s a difference.
The forgiveness exercise that asks you to write a letter is less about the letter and more about the returning. Every time you write it, you clarify something. Every time you burn it, you practice releasing it. You are not trying to finish it. You are trying to teach yourself that the thing can be set down. That you can pick it up, and put it down, and be okay.
Eleven letters is not failure. Eleven letters is work.
I find this kind of iteration braver than the one-time release. It doesn’t require you to be ready. It just requires you to keep showing up to the thing you’re trying to process. To not give up because the first attempt didn’t end it.
She writes the letters. She burns them. She returns to it, again and again, because whatever she’s carrying is not ready to go, and she is not willing to stop trying.
What does she know now, after eleven attempts, that she didn’t know at the beginning?
Healing from certain things is not a linear progression toward a finish line. It’s a spiral. You keep coming back to the same material and each time you find something slightly different inside it. The anger smaller. The grief more clear. The thing you couldn’t name eventually finding its word.
She has written eleven letters. She will probably write a twelfth.
Some things worth sitting with:
- Is there something you’ve been working through that keeps asking you to return to it?
- What do you know now about a hard thing that you couldn’t see clearly when it first happened?
- What would it mean to keep working on something without a deadline for when it should be done?
You might also find yourself in He Had a Good Childhood. That Made It Harder to Explain What Was Missing..
Inspired by a real story shared anonymously online.