Forgive yourself

I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.'

If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that.

The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.
-- Maya Angelou --

It takes courage to ask for forgiveness. We try to be a good person but as human, we sometimes make mistakes. We then ask for forgiveness, whether or not the person will accept our apology. The idea of forgiveness is not only to acknowledge that we have done an error, but also to give peace to ourselves. If we hold on to our past, we can never move on.

Similarly, we don’t have to wait for the person to apologize for their mistake. It is easier to forgive without being asked.

Just by taking the step to say that you are sorry, you have become a better person than before. Even if they choose not to accept, the least you can do is to forgive yourself.