I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you. – Dilruba Ahmed

Showing ourselves some compassion is easier said than done.

Many of us have a background tape of critical thoughts looping in our heads. A sense that we never quite measure up. Poet David Whyte aptly calls it the “unmerciful ways we talk to ourselves.”

The literature on self compassion points out that most of us wouldn’t think of speaking to a friend or loved one the way we talk to ourselves. There is a library of material dedicated to promoting self compassion through reflection, meditation, and self care, but it remains an elusive goal for many.

Poetry is also a powerful resource. I think of it as a sort of side door to explore complicated or difficult emotions.

I first heard the poem Phase I, by Dilruba Ahmed, on the Poetry Unbound podcast with Pádraig  Ó Tuama. It spoke to me immediately and I found myself thinking about her words in the days that followed.

I forgive you for leaving
windows open in rain
and soaking library books
again. For putting forth

only revisions of yourself,
with punctuation worked over,
instead of the disordered truth,
…

I forgive you. For feeling awkward
and nervous without reason.
For bearing Keats’s empty vessel
with such calm you worried

you had, perhaps, no moral
center at all. For treating your mother
with contempt when she deserved
compassion. I forgive you. I forgive

you. I forgive you. For growing
a capacity for love that is great
but matched only, perhaps,
by your loneliness. For being unable

to forgive yourself first so you
could then forgive others and
at last find a way to become
the love that you want in this world.”

(For the full text of the poem see the interview.)

I wanted to share the poem and see what kind of conversation it would invite, so I brought it to a group of counselors interested in compassion-focused therapy. We read it together and talked about what struck a chord with us personally and professionally.    

Like how it seamlessly brings together small transgressions (like leaving a window open in the rain) and large regrets (like treating a parent with undeserved contempt).

Like how it hints at the hard-to-articulate emotions of guilt and shame, without explicitly naming them.

Like how the vulnerable voice of the narrator invites our own honest reflections.  

Like how it brings us back over and over again to the possibility of forgiveness and repair.

Then with the poem fresh in our minds, we wrote.

The piece that came tumbling out of me that day felt like a direct response to Ahmed, as well as a long overdue conversation with myself:  

I forgive you for leaving the light on in empty rooms. For flashes of anger and impatience at loved ones, I forgive you. For failing to be generous when it cost little, I forgive you. For days when you forget so much and notice so little, I forgive you. For phone calls not made and conversations that never happened, I forgive you. For singing off key and dancing badly, I forgive you. For the stacks of mail left unopened, I forgive you. For not knowing when to speak up and when to keep quiet, I forgive you. I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you… 

Like Ahmed’s poem, my piece documents the many ways I have fallen short in relationships and makes me wonder how this impacts on my present. The poem suggests that dropping idealized versions of ourselves, that are always just beyond reach anyway, is a good place to start.

And as Ó Tuama points out, the stories of failure we carry around prevent us from showing up the way we want to in the present.  

And that’s what I think this poem is about, in many ways, the things we hold against ourselves that prevent us from being loving in the moment, because we’re so caught up, perhaps, in the stories of failure, some of them deserved, and some of them not deserved, the stories of failure that we hold against ourselves from our past, or from the ideal version of ourselves that we think we should be.

The poem also points us towards the connection between self compassion and compassion toward others. Ahmed said in a reading that she felt the need to turn inwards to deal with the turmoil of the external world when she wrote the poem. She was thinking about self forgiveness as a difficult, but necessary, precursor to forgiving others.

Since that time I have re-written this poem many times and every version is different. I am always a bit surprised by what emerges but try to embrace it. It reminds me of poet Jericho Brown‘s observation that we don’t write anything really meaningful until we write something we didn’t expect to.

Kim Rosen talks about how the poems we are drawn to are like medicine. They speak to something we need, but can also stretch and challenge us.

It felt like Ahmed’s poem was that kind of medicine for me.

Writing my responses to the poem was a good reminder that the stream of inner chatter is always changing. That the story we tell ourselves about ourselves never remains the same. Maybe just remembering that is a reason to be more compassionate.

After all, the poem begins with “I forgive you” and there are reminders to forgive woven throughout the litany of wrongdoings recorded there. While not ignoring the inevitable regrets and places we fall short, this is a much kinder conversation to have with ourselves and, ultimately, with others.