Letting go: forgiving yourself first

For a long stretch of my life, my mind was a rudderless ship. It drifted wherever the past pushed it — the regrets, the “what ifs”, the endless replay of mistakes I couldn’t undo. I’d lie awake building futures in my head and wake up to the same heavy chest, going nowhere.

I used to think the problem was that I didn’t know what to change. It wasn’t. I knew. The problem was that I was trying to set off on a new journey while still dragging an anchor — and the heaviest part of that anchor was the blame I’d been aiming at myself.

The thing you’re carrying isn’t all your fault

Some of what we carry, we didn’t choose to pick up.

As a boy, I was sent after school to a relative’s home to be looked after — and what happened there was that I was harmed by someone who was supposed to keep me safe. I won’t go into detail; the detail isn’t the point. The point is what a child does with something like that. He decides, somewhere deep down, that he must have caused it. That he is the kind of person these things happen to.

I carried that shame and guilt for nearly half my life. I told no one. I left for Chennai at sixteen partly to find independence, and partly, I think, to go somewhere nobody knew me — to start clean in a place where my own story couldn’t follow me. Of course it followed me anyway. It always does. You can change your postcode. You can’t outrun a feeling you’ve stored in your body.

Survivors often carry a guilt that was never theirs to begin with — a misguided belief that they were somehow responsible. I lived inside that belief for years before I could even name it.

Here is what took me far too long to learn: forgiving yourself is not the same as letting yourself off the hook. When the wound came from someone else, there is no hook. There is only a child who did the most natural thing in the world — blamed himself because that felt safer than blaming the adults he depended on. Forgiving yourself, in that case, is simply telling the truth at last: that was not yours to carry.

Why you can’t change while you’re still holding it

In the book I keep coming back to one line: what’s effortless to do is just as effortless to neglect. Carrying old blame is exactly like that. It costs you everything and asks for nothing. It’s the path of least resistance — easier to stay the person things happen to than to risk becoming someone new.

Think of it through the lens I write about most: the move from effort to effortless. Most behaviour change fails not because people lack willpower but because the old way has a better UX in the moment — it’s the lazy, automatic default. Self-blame works the same way. Replaying the same loop feels awful, but it’s familiar. Familiar is frictionless. Hope, by contrast, asks you to do something hard: lay the weight down with no guarantee of what comes next.

So the real first step in any change — physical, financial, relational, spiritual — isn’t adding a new habit. It’s subtraction. Putting something down. We’re trained to fix our lives by piling on: more goals, more resolutions, more 5 a.m. alarms. But sometimes the most powerful move isn’t what you add. It’s what you stop carrying.

You cannot pick up a new life with both hands already full.

What letting go actually looked like for me

I wish I could tell you it was one clean moment of release. It wasn’t. Here’s the honest version.

I tried to do it alone, and I wasted years. I meditated. I built a manifestation scrapbook with real love in it, picturing the future I wanted. And then I’d fail to act on any of it, because you cannot manifest your way out of something you haven’t grieved. Imagination kept carrying me to an idealised future; it never once carried me across the gap. Only action in the present does that — and I wasn’t yet free enough to act.

Naming it out loud changed everything. For me that meant a few non-judgmental friends who simply listened without flinching. It also meant accepting, eventually, that some weights are too heavy to lift with bare hands. Talking to a trained mental-health professional isn’t a sign you’re broken — it’s the same as calling a doctor for a wound that won’t close on its own. If any of this is alive in you right now, please let someone qualified help you carry it. I learned that the slow, expensive way.

I stopped treating recovery as a destination. Dr. Leland Kaiser has a line that cracked something open for me: “You can change your future as quickly as you can change your mind.” Not your circumstances — your mind. The story you tell about what happened and who you are because of it. The moment I stopped narrating myself as the person these things happen to, the future stopped looking fixed.

I won’t pretend it’s fully gone. Some residue stays — I still half-expect people to take advantage and disappear. But it no longer steers the ship. That’s the goal: not to erase the past, but to take your hands off the wheel it was holding.

Forgiveness as the bridge, not the destination

In the willpower piece on this site I described willpower as a bridge across a valley — you use it only until the new behaviour becomes the easy one, then you put it down. Self-forgiveness is the same kind of bridge. It’s not a feeling that arrives one morning, fully formed. It’s the work you do to get from the old, frictionless self-blame to a new default where you’re simply on your own side.

And the payoff is bigger than peace. When my mother passed away after a long medical struggle, I was devastated — but I wasn’t destroyed. The years I’d spent learning to grieve old wounds had quietly taught me how to grieve a fresh one. The work compounds. Master letting go in one corner of your life and you build the muscle for every other change waiting down the line — in your body, your money, your relationships, your work. That’s the whole reason these eight spheres of life sit in one book and not eight: the inner work in one bleeds into all the others.

Change is inevitable. Suffering, as I keep reminding myself, is optional. But you don’t get to the optional part while your arms are full of something you were never meant to carry alone.

So before you reach for the new plan, the new habit, the new you — check what’s in your hands. Some of it was never yours. You’re allowed to set it down. Forgive yourself first, not because you did something wrong, but because you’ve been punishing someone who was only trying to survive.