What to do When You Deserved an Apology

I deserved an apology. I still do. I was wronged. My trust was broken. My life was shattered. Many of the things I went through are unspeakable, while others are just hard to say. I deserved an apology for the way that he left. I deserved an apology for the way he treated me.

And I can say with confidence that I'll never get one. For me, it's not about closure. It's not about how he wronged me. It's about that still, to do this day, he will never admit that he hurt me the ways that I know he did. So not only will I never get an apology, but he will never even feel sorry. Not now. Not years from now. I have to live with that.

If you've been hurt by someone, you deserved an apology too. One of my favorite quotes is "when someone tells you that you hurt them, you don't get to decide that you didn't."

So you felt that hurt. You still feel that hurt. You have to live with it and move on from it. And you have to know that they didn't care. If they cared, they'd be sorry.

It's a hard pill to swallow, that someone could shatter you and never think twice about it. Never look back.

But even though they aren't sorry, you still have to forgive them. What you deserve even more than an apology is the opportunity to free yourself from your pain. You deserve to embrace forgiveness.

When my boyfriend and I broke up, I started a journal to help me with the forgiveness. I wrote down 1 bad memory everyday and took time to reflect on it. This is one of my first entries:

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I was sobbing in your lap begging you to stay. You went anyways. You left me and chose her. And then you never stopped choosing her. I laid on my bedroom floor waiting for you to come home just to be mad at me for still crying. All I wanted was for you to choose me. Why wouldn't you choose me? Why didn't you care about the way you were hurting me? Why her?

And then I ended the entry just as I ended all the others -

But I forgive you.

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The journal is filled with entries like this. Some are short and to the point. Others are long rants, retelling the stories that broke me. I let it out. I let myself feel everything I needed to feel. And then, I forgave him for that.

Those memories still haunt me. They're not just gone now. But the importance of me forgiving him for every horrible things he did to my heart runs deeper than the pain those memories brought me.

I needed to do it to be free.

That's the thing about forgiveness. It's like the moment when your head pushed through the waves in the ocean and you get a big gulp of fresh air as the water drips down your face. It's a break through. It puts you above everything that tries to swallow you.

Yes, you deserve an apology. But you won't get one. Yes, you deserved better. But this is what you got. How you choose to live with that is up to you.

Forgiving someone who isn't sorry - someone who doesn't deserve your grace - might be the hardest thing you've ever done. But it's not for them. It's for you.