PLAIN TRUTH: Forgive yourself for past mistakes. It’s the only way to heal

Do not let your past hinder you from celebrating your present. PHOTO| FOTOSEARCH

What you need to know:

We are all a result of the sum of the decisions we make, but this doesn’t mean that we should carry our past mistakes or even unfortunate things that happened to us as chips on our shoulders.

One Monday morning in April 2015, when we were young and free, my partner and I decided to make an impromptu trip to Kigali. The idea was to not prepare, just show up in the city and let it surprise us. Well, this turned out to be a bad idea as the country was smack in the middle of their annual, month-long commemoration of the 1994 genocide. The city had shut down and there was not an open mall, eatery, bank or forex bureau in sight. It was quite the adventure.

Genocide

What I found more interesting was the atmosphere hanging over the city during this period. Whenever I watched films and read books on the genocide, I imagined that to move on, the Rwandese did not speak about it. You know, like we really no longer go into the details of our own post-election violence period. Instead, it is the opposite. All month long, they speak about the genocide. They replay the painful, graphic images of how lives were lost on their local televisions. They call it Kwibuka, meaning ‘we remember’. They are determined not to forget the genocide so that it never happens again. This commemoration seems to have helped them heal.

Trying to Conceive

I remembered Rwanda last weekend when I encountered a woman who has been trying to conceive for over a decade. I remembered because she will not move on from her past. She hasn’t sought any interventions or even tried to find out what the problem is because she is convinced that she deserves whatever she gets. Her reason? Her wild past. Because she will not move on from the mistakes in her past, she refuses to open up to any good thing that might be coming. Every time she gets her period, she cries and says the universe has not forgiven her yet.

Endeavouring not to forget past mistakes might help a wounded nation heal and move on. But, for a woman, such memories often have the opposite effect. Remembering where you are coming from will keep you grounded, but letting past mistakes consume you to the point where you are afraid to expect good things to come from your future is simply getting in your own way. We are all a result of the sum of the decisions we make, but this doesn’t mean that we should carry our past mistakes or even unfortunate things that happened to us as chips on our shoulders.

Talk about It

Talk about the poverty that you grew up in, talk about your difficulties learning, your wild twenties, the drug habit you battled. Talk about it, feel all the things you need to feel but let that not be your identity. Don’t become the woman who goes on a job interview and when asked to talk about herself, instead of speaking of all the good qualities and skills she is bringing to the table, she goes on and on about her failed marriage or complicated family background.

Sit on the toilet for as long as you need to but in the end, you will need to get off, flash it and head back out to face the world.