There are things people carry for years without saying out loud.

Something they did.

Something someone did to them.

Sometimes both.

Most people know exactly where their unforgivable things are.

You may not think about yours every day. You might go months without touching it. Years, even. You build a life around it. You love people. You work. You laugh. You become someone who, in many ways, barely resembles the person you were then.

And still, there it is.

The thing that should never have happened.

The thing you should never have done.

We tend to put these things in very different places.

The things done to us become wounds. We try to understand them. We trace where they went. We notice how they changed the way we love, trust, leave, stay, protect ourselves.

The things we’ve done to others don’t always get the same tenderness.

Those become evidence.

Evidence of who we really are.

Evidence that maybe there is something in us that cannot be repaired.

And somewhere else, someone may be carrying what we did as the worst thing that ever happened to them.

That’s hard to hold.

Because most of us know what it is to have been hurt. We know what it feels like when someone makes a choice and we are the ones who have to live with what it did.

There are things people do that are cruel.

There are choices that destroy families.

Betrayals that change people.

Violence that cannot be explained away by a difficult childhood.

There are things that should never have happened.

Understanding a person does not make those things less true.

And yet.

The person who broke you may have gone home carrying their own broken places.

The person you hurt may never know the places in you that led you there.

Understanding that doesn’t undo anything.

It doesn’t make harm less harmful.

It doesn’t turn accountability into innocence.

But it does make the story more complicated.

We like people to be one thing.

Victim or perpetrator.

Good or bad.

The one who was hurt or the one who did the hurting.

It makes the world easier to understand.

Until we find ourselves on both sides.

Until the person who did something unforgivable is someone we love.

Until it’s us.

Then the categories don’t hold quite as well.

Because people who have been deeply hurt sometimes hurt people.

People who have caused enormous pain can also love deeply.

Someone can betray another person and still be capable of extraordinary tenderness.

Someone can spend years protecting everyone around them and still have one moment they cannot bear to remember.

Someone can be the safest person you’ve ever known and have once been unsafe.

Someone can change.

Someone can also not change.

None of those truths cancel the others.

And maybe this is where we begin doing a strange kind of math with our lives.

If we cannot undo the bad, maybe we can outweigh it.

Be good enough afterward.

Love enough people.

Show up enough times.

Give enough away.

Become gentle enough.

Spend the rest of our lives being the person we wish we had been then.

Maybe eventually the scales will tip.

Except they don’t seem to.

Bad is heavier than good.

Or maybe it just sits differently inside us.

A hundred moments of kindness can somehow coexist with one moment of cruelty without touching it. Thirty years of faithfulness may not erase a betrayal. An entire life of being safe cannot go backward and make the moment you were unsafe disappear.

The good is real.

So is the bad.

And maybe that’s where the math stops working.

Because what if the life you live afterward was never supposed to pay for the life you lived before?

What if becoming a better person isn’t repayment?

What if every good thing you do doesn’t need to be handed backward to your worst moment as evidence that you are no longer that person?

Then we’re left with something much harder.

We have to let the worst thing remain true.

Without letting it become the only true thing.

Maybe regret gets to stay.

Maybe guilt has something to say.

Maybe there are things we should feel terrible about because they were terrible.

But perhaps remorse was never meant to become a permanent identity.

Perhaps the pain of knowing what we did is not a debt we have to keep paying to prove that we understand its weight.

Because at some point, continuing to hate yourself doesn’t help the person you hurt.

It doesn’t change what happened.

It doesn’t restore what was lost.

It only creates one more human life organized around the harm.

And maybe that’s the place this gets almost unbearably difficult.

Because what if you can’t forgive yourself?

What if twenty years have passed and you still can’t?

What if the person you need forgiveness from is gone?

What if there is no conversation left to have, no apology left to give, no repair left to make?

What if you have changed and it still doesn’t feel like enough?

Do you just keep paying?

Maybe healing does not require you to forgive yourself.

Maybe forgiveness is too high a bar for some things.

Maybe demanding it becomes another impossible assignment.

First, you have to live with what you did.

Then you have to somehow arrive at a place where you’re okay with yourself for having done it.

Maybe you never will be.

Maybe you don’t need to be.

Maybe there is a difference between forgiving yourself and no longer punishing yourself.

A difference between regret and a life sentence.

A difference between remembering what you did and becoming it over and over again.

You can say:

I did this.

I wish I hadn’t.

If I could go back, I would choose differently.

I understand more now about who I was and how I got there.

That understanding does not excuse what I did.

And I am still here.

Maybe that’s enough to begin somewhere.

Not absolution.

Not innocence.

Not pretending everything happens for a reason or that the worst thing you did somehow needed to happen so you could become who you are.

Some things were just terrible.

Maybe they didn’t make you better.

Maybe what came after was simply what you chose to do with the life that remained.

And perhaps that matters without needing to erase anything.

You don’t have to out-good the bad.

You don’t have to make the scales balance.

You don’t have to turn your worst decision into a redemption story.

You can let it remain bad.

You can regret it for the rest of your life.

You can make amends where amends are possible.

You can live differently where they aren’t.

Not as payment.

Not because enough goodness will eventually buy your way out.

Simply because this is who you are now.

Maybe the hardest thing to accept is that the person who did it was you.

Not some old version you have to disown.

Not a monster you briefly became.

You.

And the person who wishes they hadn’t done it is also you.

The person who learned is you.

The person who has loved since then is you.

The person who still sometimes cannot bear the memory is you.

The person who may never forgive you is also allowed to exist.

The person who loves you anyway is allowed to exist.

None of them has the whole truth.

Maybe healing is not finding the version of the story that finally makes you innocent.

Maybe it is becoming large enough inside yourself that innocence is no longer required.

That doesn’t mean accountability disappears.

It might mean accountability becomes something other than punishment.

It becomes how you live.

What you notice now.

What you refuse to repeat.

What you repair when you can.

What you carry when you can’t.

Maybe some things will always hurt when you touch them.

Maybe that’s not evidence that you haven’t healed.

Maybe some things are supposed to matter forever.

There is still the person who was hurt.

There is still the person who caused hurt.

Sometimes they are standing in the same body.

Maybe neither one needs to disappear.

Maybe neither one needs to win.

Maybe the work is not deciding which one is the truest version of you.

Maybe a whole human life is somehow large enough to hold them both.

The worst thing done to you.

The worst thing done by you.

The regret.

The love.

The harm.

Everything that came afterward.

Not balanced.

Not canceled out.

Not forgiven, if forgiveness never comes.

Just no longer fighting for the right to be the only thing that defines you.

Maybe that is the place in between.

Where you stop trying to undo what cannot be undone.

And stop requiring yourself to suffer forever in order to prove that you know it mattered.

Where the worst thing remains true.

And, finally, everything else gets to be true too.

Embracing Shadows, Illuminating Hope,
Chelsey Fjeldheim, LCSW
Empowering Souls on the Path of Healing

Copyright © 2026 Chelsey Fjeldheim, Courage Speaks Counseling