Showering with Cupcakes Makes Me Super Profound

I spend far too much time inside my own head. I like it in here. Once you get used to the air raid sirens, bear traps, and the floating image of Mrs. Duggar’s box falling out and being pulled behind her like a little pink wagon, my brain is pretty cheerful place to be.

Sunday, I was faced with little other to do than push back the corners of a blazing hangover. Oh, and figure out why there was a cupcake in my shower (migrating foodstuffs have become a big problem in my apartment lately).

So I did some thinking about forgiveness. First, there’s forgiveness for those who have hurt you, damaged you, or changed you for the worse in one way or another. For me, that’s always been the easy one. It takes a very long time to run to the edge of my charity.

I don't mean that in a wimpy victim sort of way, like, "Oh, Bobby slept with my sister and took all my money and conned me into going on Jerry Springer to tell me he'd legally changed his name to Monkey Spanker...but I love him SO MUCH!"

It's a little more like this:

If you’ve ever wronged me, I can promise you’ll be forgiven. That may not mean I want you around. I’ve learned over the years that some people can grind your soul into powder. But I’ve tried to drag some sort of lesson out of all my sorry messes, and I’m thankful for everything I’ve learned.

Then there’s forgiving yourself. I’m utter crap at that one. I’ve never learned to be as charitable and kind with myself as I am with others. I will torture myself over the smallest transgression, apologize in triplicate for forgetting the cocktail napkins, and I’m not quite over that time at horse camp when I accidentally busted my cabin-mate for dating a counselor.

The biggest challenge of all is forgiveness for the things I’ve done to myself. The list is extensive and messy: I’ve slathered my body in booze, wasted years on a complicated relationship with food, wasted further years on complicated relationships with virtually everything and everyone else, given an all-access pass to emotional vampires, squandered acres of opportunity and talent, mixed my best intentions with some of the worst men, and allowed my pride to block me from asking for help when I needed it most.

It’s not about failure. I can colossally screw up, and scrape my dignity off the floor in no time flat (once you’ve failed at marriage, hey, you can fail at anything!). It’s those sucker punch moments, when I see that I’m far from my best self, and that there’s always further to fall and no easy path to anywhere. I don’t think I’m all that unusual: ask your friends for the top ten worst things they’ve ever done, and I promise the things they’ve done to themselves will rank the highest.

There’s no easy way to wrap this up, so I’ll throw it out to the commentariat: among the worst things you’ve ever done, how many were things you did to yourself? And how did you forgive yourself?