Unforgiving

I come from a long line of bitter and angry women.
My mom started breaking that generational curse of grudge holding and while I reap the rewards of her hard work I have a lot of hard work on my own.
Like so many people it is so much easier for me to hold on to the bad, the hurt, the anger and so easy for me to nurse a grudge.

The thing is that I've worked through forgiveness for a lot of things. Things I never brought up at the time, things I never told anyone about for years and years. Bad things. (It's taken me a long time to say they were bad because I'm constantly comparing them to worse things and discounting the hurt it has caused and even now I feel like I need to qualify it, which I just have essentially)

I've forced and forced the issues until I work through it until forgiveness. I've forgiven several people day after day after year after year until the forgiveness sticks.
Yet I'm stuck.
Here I am stuck. On this shitty but not so big of a deal hurt that I just can't get past. I'm nursing it lovingly and holding on tight. Quite frankly I just don't want to let it go.
I want to be hurt. I want to be mad and dammit I want to stay that way.
It's one of the dumbest things I've done in a long time I think.

Because it's making me very brittle. It's making me bitter.(although my defense mechanism of sarcasm and witty batter is getting one hell of a work out)

The one thing I never want to be is like those women I knew growing up. I'm trying like hell not to be.

But the tricky thing about grudges. The sneaky thing about unforgiveness is, that the longer you hold on to them the tighter they hold on to you. It becomes this attachment to your heart that suffocates the ability to love, to trust, to even be happy.
The screech of bitterness drowns the sounds of friendship and grace, it deafens you to the whisper of a God that forgave those that put his son to death.
It's the metallic taste of anger that dilutes the very air you breathe.

Before you know it, even when you're ready to let it go. You find that you can't. You find you're to wrapped up in being hurt and rejected to even allow yourself to be invited in again anywhere.

I'm trying to untie these knots in my stomach. I'm trying to unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth and I'm trying to move forward. Because I've stretched myself so thin, I've become so brittle that even the slightest deep breath is threatening.