Had this great Longwave journal from April 17th, 2020

• rambling incoming: I think self-forgiveness is an underappreciated concept. I don't know how universal this is but I spend a lot of mental energy setting large, small, or even micro-level expectations for myself and then falling to meet them. these compound into a lot of useless background anxiety.
• "forgive yourself" has always come off to me as a meaningless self-care platitude. but accounting for your small failures and mistakes that have upset you — and probably only you — and then working through them from the perspective of both the wrongdoer and the aggrieved, can be worthwhile. the moment those two perspectives meet gives me a sense of peace that until recently I didn't have a name for, which made it harder to find. using the language of forgiveness as it occurs between people has given me a framework to do it with myself.
• take a situation where person A does something to upset person B. when B asks A "why did you *do* that?", they are actually asking for an acknowledgment and an apology more than an explanation. in the same way, there are many times when I look back at a decision from earlier and ask "why did I do that?". self-forgiveness starts with the understanding that an apology, rather than self-resentment or an attempt at rationalization, is in order.