Before you freak out and say there are just some things you can’t forgive, hear me out.

Carrying around past hurts, old resentments and grudges is the heaviest baggage we have, of all, and it serves no one. It does, however, sap of us the happiness we most desire in life, and keeps us from living the life we really want to live.

When you look up the word forgive in the dictionary, one of the definitions you’ll find is:

forgive: to cease to feel resentment against (an offender.)

Forgiveness is something you do for yourself, not the person you’re forgiving. When you forgive someone, you’re saying that you are no longer emotionally attached or invested in what they did or said (or didn’t do or say) that hurt you. When you forgive, you’re saying, “I choose to let go of the hurt and resentment that is eating away at me. I’m setting that piece of unnecessary baggage down and walking away.”

Forgiveness does NOT mean you condone what happened, and it does not mean you leave yourself susceptible to it happening again. Forgiving does not equal forgetting, either. When you forgive someone, all you are doing is removing the emotional attachment. You are detaching. You are deciding to let go of the pain and hurt and move forward in your life. What happened, happened. It’s still a part of your past, but it no longer has to define your future, unless you choose to let it by hanging onto it.

Many times, the party being forgiven doesn’t even know, or need to know. So, forgiveness is something you can practice with someone who has died, or someone you have no way to contact. You can also forgive the corporation who downsized you out of your job, and all kinds of other “faceless” entities you may be directing feelings of resentment toward. There is no reason to be stuck. You can choose to set all that baggage down and walk away.