AUTHOR'S CORNER;

LET'S GET CLOSE AND PERSONAL!

Most artists of any kind bear a considerable amount of scars from life; those very scars are what makes them want to express their emotions into art form.  It is the fuel that drives them to create and showcase those emotions through various methods; music, art, drama, writing.  That scab that sits so roughly upon the senses, itching and smarting as the hands of time scratch away at it. Indenting a little more each time until a visible groove slowly appears.  And what is this scar, this scab that refuses to disappear? What is it that wrecks our very essence and turns us into the cynical creators that we become?  It is not love, nor hate, for love and hate are easy to come by and easy to lose.  It is simply the unforgiven!  

In the war of emotions, unrequited love, unquenched hate, and all the feelings in between, the only one that is hard to come by is forgiveness.  For it is not even an emotion, not a proper one. Forgiveness or the lack of it comes with a myriad of emotions, from sadness, bitterness, loneliness and even deep love or a dark, helpless need. All rolled into a mass ball of confusion, drenched in a loss of dignity and pride.  To forgive would mean to take your naked emotional self and bare your soul wide open to the wrong that has been done to you.  To forgive would mean to betray your own soul, to belittle yourself, to effectively admit that you are worth so little, measure so small, feel so irrelevant, that whatever has been done against you is okay by you!  To forgive would mean to abandon that last shred of defence you have left.  To give away the little power you have.  For in order to get to the point of needing to forgive you would have had to have been very wronged in the first place.  Forgiveness is the last defeat. If defeated how will one continue, how will one face another day, how will one create?

If one forgives it is like wiping from history the wrong that has been done, and if that happens, then what was the point of the wrong and the bad feelings you had to endure in the first place?  How do you live with yourself if you were to just let it go, all those years of torture, all those nights of self berating, all those tear stained heartbeats that drummed your sorrow would be for nothing, for no one!  

It is easier not to forgive, it is less questionable to hold on to a burning anguish than to let it go and have to question yourself.  In not forgiving, you know where you stand; you were wronged, therefore you shall not forget.  But if you did forgive, suddenly your position is weakened, you can no longer hold on to self assurance and doubt, doubt about your self worth, your integrity, your part in it all, will set in and you my friend will have to admit to your part. Much easier to wallow in the shadows of the wronged than to stare at yourself in the harsh mirror of self exposure.  Much kinder to be the victim than the fool.  Much sweeter to feel the pain of injustice than to endure the humiliation of error.  

The self is a proud creature and has got to be self assured in order to survive; it is the nature of the self to do so.  If not to gain grandeur, than to at least hold on for just a little longer, to survive a little further. 

But in not forgiving, in not letting go, we hold ourselves captive in our own emotional prison, and it eats away at us until one day it simply consumes us and leaves us but a shell, a hollow carcass that can never again be filled.  In not forgiving we are not holding power, but instead we are giving power away and living our lives through the person who has wronged us.  In not forgiving we are trapping ourselves in the moment for ever.  In not forgiving we are allowing our aggressor to own us, to own our souls and minds.  And we dedicate our souls to them, we dedicate our art for them, we create through them, through their bad deeds!  Not only have they wronged us, they now own us.  

Letting go is the hardest thing a person can do, and yet it is the most liberating thing you can do.  Letting go is when you can do, act and think without the memory of the wrong deed ever coming to your mind.  Letting go is when you can catch yourself unaware and realise that you have not thought about it for a very long time. When the silence of the night no longer bothers you, and your thoughts no longer invade you.  When the feeling of dread is no longer a part of who you are and your heart does not ache.  Letting go is simply dropping that person who has hurt you and letting them fall into the abyss of forgetfulness.  Because as long as you remember them, they live on and their power grows and the effect of what they have done will be ten fold each year.  And before you know it, that one bad thing they have done to you will be a lifetime of tears and heartache and a wasted youth. 

And as for negating that bad act by forgiving; that bad deed that the other has done to you, think about it, it's in the past, the hands of time have already passed over it and wiped it away....it is no longer there, and just like a burnt out star, it is just an echoing light in the blackness of nothingness!