TedTest

From the Ted Talk by Sarah Montana: Why forgiveness is worth it

Unscramble the Blue Letters

In the summer of 2016, I did the sensible thing: I quit my cushy job at a hgede fund to write a play about my family's mredur. (Sighs) I told my friends and family that this was about art, but in truth, I was on a suritpial vision quest. I was seeking closure to a rlaitosenhip with someone that I barely knew - the kid who killed my mother and brother. He was my friend's younger bthroer, a kid from our neighborhood. He came over a handful of times to raid our family's snack cabinet. My mom actually used to wave to him from the van and say, "He's going through a hard time, I just want to make sure he knows that I see him." He broke into our husoe a couple of days before Christmas, looking for some stuff to sell for cash. When he came across my brother Jim asleep on the couch, he panicked, shot him and fled the scene. Then he realized he forgot his coat. By the time he came back, my mom had found Jim. Because he knew that she recognized him, and, to quote him, "Because she wouldn't stop scnreimag," he shot and killed her too. He is currently serving back-to-back life sentences in a prison in Southwestern Virginia. (Sighs) Over the course of the next seven years, I somehow managed not to hate him, but my grief and tmaura did something a little bit weirder. He became a non-person to me. He wasn't a person, he was the face of all evil. He was the tieswtr that came through and ripped up our house and threw it in some hileslh version of Oz, but not a 17-year-old boy - or, I realized now, a 24-year-old man. A man who came of age in a cell, if he came of age at all. And as I set down to write the villain of my play and my life, I realized I had a name, some ftcareurd cohilodhd moremeis, a brief court document and nothing else to go on. So I went to the source of all answers, Google. I googled his prisoner ID number. That's when the internet seukcr punched me in the face. Two tdirhs of prisoners in his penitentiary spend 23 hours a day in solitary confinement in eight-by-ten clles with slats for lhgit. Conditions are so bad that in 2012 the entire prison went on a hunger strike. As I scrolled through case after case of human rights violations at this prison, suddenly, he became a prsoen to me again. I remember the first time I saw mom and Jim's bodies in the funeral home, how my recoiled when I felt the small, destructive supernova that the bullet made in the back of Jim's skull. My mom's face just collapsed in on itself. Not her, just flesh and bones in that black dress we bought at Kohl's the week before. Those were my most painful memories. But when I peutcird him - beaten, starving, ciryng out in a dark cell - yeah, that was somehow just as painful. And I realized it was because we were still connected. That steel tether of trauma that he hooked into my side when he killed them was still there, and I had been lurching against its pull and dragging him through the mud for the past seven years, whether I knew it or not. And it was with a little hroror that I realized that he may have killed them, but I chose to keep us coeecntnd. So after winadg through all the options - I mean, literally every option at my disposal - I reaezild the only way to get rid of this dude was to forgive him. That was a real bmmeur of a conclusion to come to. (Laughter) Because the truth was I tuhghot that I already had forgiven him. I told my findres I forgave him; I told my family I forgave him; I even said "I forgive you" in the national news. So if saying you forgive someone is not the same thing as doing it, why was this guy still hooked into my side, dragging me around, making me do dumb things like quit my job to write a play? Turns out there is no fake it 'till you make it in fgeeonvisrs even though that's exactly what society expects us to do. So how do you forgive effectively, once and for all? That question started another Google rabibt hole, and then the theological rabbit hole, and then the Psychiatric-Journal and medical-journal rabbit hole until finally, my poor husband came home to a frantic wife, feral, just pacing the apartment, spewing statistics about forgiveness, like, "Did you know that there are 62 passages in the Bible with the word forgive and 27 with the word forgiveness? Not a signle one tlels you how to do it!" (Laughter) They just say how great it is! It's like the Nike of spiritual gifts: "Just do it!" (Laughter) And then there's this doctor Wayne guy over here, who says, "To forgive, we just got to let go and be like water." What does that mean? My hnubsad approached me very cusiuoatly. "Sweetie, what you doing?" (Laughter) "Trying to forgive the kid who killed my family, but nobody will tell me how." Oh, there are endless five-star historical Yelp reviwes for forgiveness. The sales pitch is fantastic, but literally, What do I do? I think I was asking the wrong question, starting with how, when really what I needed to know was why. Why forgive? Why do it? That's when I discovered that most of us are forgiving for the wrong reasons. Some victims, like me, try to forgive right away because it's the right thing to do. But if we're honest with ourselves, there's only three reasons a victim fieovgrs automatically. One: you think that forgiving quickly will make you a good person. That's an easy mistake to make, right? If forgiveness is good, a good person should forgive right away. But in all my research, I actually didn't find a timeline for forgiveness. Everybody was just really desperately urging us to get around to it because they knew we didn't want to. Even Jesus, when he talks about truinng the other cehek, isn't tnklaig about forgiveness. He's talking about non-violence. There has to be a mildde ground between littneg someone of the hook right away and going full an eye for an eye on them. Two: victims feel a lot of pressure to forgive from everyone else. It can come from your friends, from your family, from the media, from mixed up rigoiuels msseganig. But the truth is, everyone wants you to forgive quickly so they can feel more cafbtolrome, and they can move on. That's a crappy reason to do anything. Three: you think that forgiveness is a shortcut to healing. You think if you skip to the end of the story, you can bypass all the angry, vulnerable, messy healing crap. Spoiler alert: that one will come back to bite you in the butt. For me, it was all three reasons. I want to be a good person, I love pleasing other people, and I hate the vbaernulle, angry, messy, healing crap. But it turns out that forgiveness is such a potent force that none of those reasons were strong enough to make it sctik. Just like love. If your motivation is selfish, even a good selfish thing like healing, it will collapse in on itself like a dying star. So why do it? Why forgive? It can't heal you; it won't save you or the other person; it can't make you a good person - at least not all by itself - because that's not what forgiveness is dngseeid to do. Forgiveness is designed to set you free. When you say, "I forgive you," what you're really saying is, "I know what you did. It's not okay, but I recognize that you are more than that. I don't want to hold us cvptiae to this thing anymore. I can heal myself, and I don't need anything from you." After you say that, and you mean it, then it's just you. No chains, no preirosns. Just the good, the bad and the ugly of whoever that person was from the start. Our culture thinks that vengeance is freedom, but it is a total prison. Any act of vnlceoie, whether it's eamotniol or physical, is this wired, twisted form of intimacy. That's why the Greeks said that a death by a good man was a good dateh. Think about it. Every time somebody thinks about my mom and my brother, they think about the fact that they're not here, and then they think about the kid who did this. That one act of violence actually bnoud the three of them together in people's minds for eternity. When we cosohe vengeance, we're actually sginnig a blood oath to chain our story to our emeeins for the rest of time. Forgiveness is the only real path to freedom. But to get free, you have to get super specific about what exactly it is that you're forgiving because you cannot firvoge something that didn't happen to you. In my research, I came across this idea from Judaism that hit me in the chest. In Judaism, the family can't forgive murderers, because they were not kileld. They can only forgive the pain, anguish and grief that the loss caused them. This was a total jackpot moment for me. I had to compartmentalize my damage: not what happened to mom and Jim, not what happened to my family, not what happened to sciteoy, what hanepepd to me. This is why jtcsuie often feels really cold for victims. It's justice's job to assess what is owed. And it is the criminal justice system's job to aessss what is owed to society. Not to vmiitcs. It is up to us to get really clear, individually, on what we are owed. You can't forgive your father for beating your mother. You can only forgive him for how sad, alienated and argny that made you feel. I couldn't forgive him for killing mom and Jim. I'm still here. I had to assess my damages. The wedding that I had without the two of them. The parts of me that my husband and kids will never get to understand without knowing the two of them. The way my life was supposed to start at 22, and he broke it. My inherent sense of safety and belonging, which, I got to be honest, I don't think are cionmg back. Those are my damages. Most of us avoid forgiveness like the plague because we do not want to look at our wounds. Wounds are scary, they are nasty, they are icky, it is why most of us look away when we donate blood. It is way easier to take all of that emotion and channel it into rage at another person. I got to be honest with you, I say: do it. (letauhgr) You thought this would be about forgiveness, huh? It's an important part of the process. aengr is important; it is the fire that cauterizes our wounds and lets them scar over and heal. Too much anger, and yes, you'll get third-degree burns. Without a little bit of heat, you'll never scar over, and you'll never know exactly what happened to you. If you don't know what happened to you, you can't know what you're fvgnoirig. But once you know what's happened to you, it's time for some good old-fashioned justice. Sorry, I married a Texan. (Laughter) So what in justice's name am I owed? An apology? An explanation? A front-row seat to their torture chmaber? Maybe - not the last part - but maybe you are owed those things in general. Nine times out of ten, if you ask for those things, you will get them. Which is why forgiveness is not the right thing in most situations. Forgiveness is only right when waiting for what we're owed comes at too high a cost. In all those years, with that guy chained to my side, I got a lot done. I went to grad soohcl, I married a wonderful man, I started a ceerar that I honestly really love. But I did it all a little more slowly, and I wasn't just dragging him along, I was dragging my mother and brother in the process, twisting the three of them up together in those chains. Pretty soon, that little posse satertd to crowd me out of my own body and my own experience. And one day, losing myself in order to punish him and keep the two of them avile felt like too high a cost to bear. It was there, in that crossroads, when I knew what had happened to me. I knew what I was owed, and I decided than choosing myself was more important than being right. That's when I was ready to forgive. So I stepped away from Google, and I didn't ask any more qosunites, and I wrote him a letter. I tore unused pages out of my mom's journals, actually, and I wrtoe. I told him that what happened on December 19th, 2008, was not okay and would probably never be okay for either of us. But just because it wasn't okay, that didn't mean he owed me anything - not an apology, not an epxalitnaon, not his role as my viillan. I told him that I hetad to be redeucd to one thing that happened to me one day. I yaerned to be more, to be whole, and I didn't think that I could do that if I looked at another person and reduced him to one thing he did one day and made evil the sum of its parts. I told him that I wished him a lifetime full of hilaneg and that I forgave him. Then, without thinking, I plopped that letter into a mbailox on the corner of Flatbush anevue and Church. For the first 10 steps, there was this lightness of being, and then that lightness started to feel like a lurch in your stomach, when you hit the spiritual tripwire. My chest unwound, it bsrut, and suddenly, I was alone with myself. I mean, really alone, giving birth to a stranger, saying hello to a girl that I hadn't seokpn to in seven yraes. (Sighs) Sometimes I miss him. (Laughter) Not him, the monster that I created. Things were a lot hreahsr and black and wthie, but they were a lot simpler when I had a villain to fight, and more familiar. As long as he was around, mom and Jim were never that far away. They were caretachrs, just ogatffse, witiang in the wings, the rest of us on stage, talking about them. But my story was about the three of them, always. To get free, I had to get clear on exactly what cronctat I was shredding. Once I did that, I found myself alone, center sagte, in the spotlight, with endless possibilities. Real forgiveness has to let go of all expectations. You can't expect a certain outcome. You can't accept them to rpely. You can't even expect to know who you're going to be on the other side of it. Forgiveness is really tricky. It's one of those tools that is only properly wielded when we have healed just enough that we have nothing left to lose. If you're still hemorrhaging in pain, it is too soon to forgive. If you can't roll up your slveee and show me your scars and tell me exactly what happened to you, it's still too soon to forgive. But it's never too late to let go of your villains and reclaim yourself. And if you're radey to let it all go - the grief, the pain, the anger, the trauma - and you're open to fniindg out who you are instead of always trying to prove yourself - I got to be honest with you - all this forgiveness hype is legit! (Laughter) Ten out of ten, five stras, would highly recommend. Thank you. (Applause)

Open Cloze

In the summer of 2016, I did the sensible thing: I quit my cushy job at a _____ fund to write a play about my family's ______. (Sighs) I told my friends and family that this was about art, but in truth, I was on a _________ vision quest. I was seeking closure to a ____________ with someone that I barely knew - the kid who killed my mother and brother. He was my friend's younger _______, a kid from our neighborhood. He came over a handful of times to raid our family's snack cabinet. My mom actually used to wave to him from the van and say, "He's going through a hard time, I just want to make sure he knows that I see him." He broke into our _____ a couple of days before Christmas, looking for some stuff to sell for cash. When he came across my brother Jim asleep on the couch, he panicked, shot him and fled the scene. Then he realized he forgot his coat. By the time he came back, my mom had found Jim. Because he knew that she recognized him, and, to quote him, "Because she wouldn't stop _________," he shot and killed her too. He is currently serving back-to-back life sentences in a prison in Southwestern Virginia. (Sighs) Over the course of the next seven years, I somehow managed not to hate him, but my grief and ______ did something a little bit weirder. He became a non-person to me. He wasn't a person, he was the face of all evil. He was the _______ that came through and ripped up our house and threw it in some _______ version of Oz, but not a 17-year-old boy - or, I realized now, a 24-year-old man. A man who came of age in a cell, if he came of age at all. And as I set down to write the villain of my play and my life, I realized I had a name, some _________ _________ ________, a brief court document and nothing else to go on. So I went to the source of all answers, Google. I googled his prisoner ID number. That's when the internet ______ punched me in the face. Two ______ of prisoners in his penitentiary spend 23 hours a day in solitary confinement in eight-by-ten _____ with slats for _____. Conditions are so bad that in 2012 the entire prison went on a hunger strike. As I scrolled through case after case of human rights violations at this prison, suddenly, he became a ______ to me again. I remember the first time I saw mom and Jim's bodies in the funeral home, how my recoiled when I felt the small, destructive supernova that the bullet made in the back of Jim's skull. My mom's face just collapsed in on itself. Not her, just flesh and bones in that black dress we bought at Kohl's the week before. Those were my most painful memories. But when I ________ him - beaten, starving, ______ out in a dark cell - yeah, that was somehow just as painful. And I realized it was because we were still connected. That steel tether of trauma that he hooked into my side when he killed them was still there, and I had been lurching against its pull and dragging him through the mud for the past seven years, whether I knew it or not. And it was with a little ______ that I realized that he may have killed them, but I chose to keep us _________. So after ______ through all the options - I mean, literally every option at my disposal - I ________ the only way to get rid of this dude was to forgive him. That was a real ______ of a conclusion to come to. (Laughter) Because the truth was I _______ that I already had forgiven him. I told my _______ I forgave him; I told my family I forgave him; I even said "I forgive you" in the national news. So if saying you forgive someone is not the same thing as doing it, why was this guy still hooked into my side, dragging me around, making me do dumb things like quit my job to write a play? Turns out there is no fake it 'till you make it in ___________ even though that's exactly what society expects us to do. So how do you forgive effectively, once and for all? That question started another Google ______ hole, and then the theological rabbit hole, and then the Psychiatric-Journal and medical-journal rabbit hole until finally, my poor husband came home to a frantic wife, feral, just pacing the apartment, spewing statistics about forgiveness, like, "Did you know that there are 62 passages in the Bible with the word forgive and 27 with the word forgiveness? Not a ______ one _____ you how to do it!" (Laughter) They just say how great it is! It's like the Nike of spiritual gifts: "Just do it!" (Laughter) And then there's this doctor Wayne guy over here, who says, "To forgive, we just got to let go and be like water." What does that mean? My _______ approached me very __________. "Sweetie, what you doing?" (Laughter) "Trying to forgive the kid who killed my family, but nobody will tell me how." Oh, there are endless five-star historical Yelp _______ for forgiveness. The sales pitch is fantastic, but literally, What do I do? I think I was asking the wrong question, starting with how, when really what I needed to know was why. Why forgive? Why do it? That's when I discovered that most of us are forgiving for the wrong reasons. Some victims, like me, try to forgive right away because it's the right thing to do. But if we're honest with ourselves, there's only three reasons a victim ________ automatically. One: you think that forgiving quickly will make you a good person. That's an easy mistake to make, right? If forgiveness is good, a good person should forgive right away. But in all my research, I actually didn't find a timeline for forgiveness. Everybody was just really desperately urging us to get around to it because they knew we didn't want to. Even Jesus, when he talks about _______ the other _____, isn't _______ about forgiveness. He's talking about non-violence. There has to be a ______ ground between _______ someone of the hook right away and going full an eye for an eye on them. Two: victims feel a lot of pressure to forgive from everyone else. It can come from your friends, from your family, from the media, from mixed up _________ _________. But the truth is, everyone wants you to forgive quickly so they can feel more ___________, and they can move on. That's a crappy reason to do anything. Three: you think that forgiveness is a shortcut to healing. You think if you skip to the end of the story, you can bypass all the angry, vulnerable, messy healing crap. Spoiler alert: that one will come back to bite you in the butt. For me, it was all three reasons. I want to be a good person, I love pleasing other people, and I hate the __________, angry, messy, healing crap. But it turns out that forgiveness is such a potent force that none of those reasons were strong enough to make it _____. Just like love. If your motivation is selfish, even a good selfish thing like healing, it will collapse in on itself like a dying star. So why do it? Why forgive? It can't heal you; it won't save you or the other person; it can't make you a good person - at least not all by itself - because that's not what forgiveness is ________ to do. Forgiveness is designed to set you free. When you say, "I forgive you," what you're really saying is, "I know what you did. It's not okay, but I recognize that you are more than that. I don't want to hold us _______ to this thing anymore. I can heal myself, and I don't need anything from you." After you say that, and you mean it, then it's just you. No chains, no _________. Just the good, the bad and the ugly of whoever that person was from the start. Our culture thinks that vengeance is freedom, but it is a total prison. Any act of ________, whether it's _________ or physical, is this _____, twisted form of intimacy. That's why the Greeks said that a death by a good man was a good _____. Think about it. Every time somebody thinks about my mom and my brother, they think about the fact that they're not here, and then they think about the kid who did this. That one act of violence actually _____ the three of them together in people's minds for eternity. When we ______ vengeance, we're actually _______ a blood oath to chain our story to our _______ for the rest of time. Forgiveness is the only real path to freedom. But to get free, you have to get super specific about what exactly it is that you're forgiving because you cannot _______ something that didn't happen to you. In my research, I came across this idea from Judaism that hit me in the chest. In Judaism, the family can't forgive murderers, because they were not ______. They can only forgive the pain, anguish and grief that the loss caused them. This was a total jackpot moment for me. I had to compartmentalize my damage: not what happened to mom and Jim, not what happened to my family, not what happened to _______, what ________ to me. This is why _______ often feels really cold for victims. It's justice's job to assess what is owed. And it is the criminal justice system's job to ______ what is owed to society. Not to _______. It is up to us to get really clear, individually, on what we are owed. You can't forgive your father for beating your mother. You can only forgive him for how sad, alienated and _____ that made you feel. I couldn't forgive him for killing mom and Jim. I'm still here. I had to assess my damages. The wedding that I had without the two of them. The parts of me that my husband and kids will never get to understand without knowing the two of them. The way my life was supposed to start at 22, and he broke it. My inherent sense of safety and belonging, which, I got to be honest, I don't think are ______ back. Those are my damages. Most of us avoid forgiveness like the plague because we do not want to look at our wounds. Wounds are scary, they are nasty, they are icky, it is why most of us look away when we donate blood. It is way easier to take all of that emotion and channel it into rage at another person. I got to be honest with you, I say: do it. (________) You thought this would be about forgiveness, huh? It's an important part of the process. _____ is important; it is the fire that cauterizes our wounds and lets them scar over and heal. Too much anger, and yes, you'll get third-degree burns. Without a little bit of heat, you'll never scar over, and you'll never know exactly what happened to you. If you don't know what happened to you, you can't know what you're _________. But once you know what's happened to you, it's time for some good old-fashioned justice. Sorry, I married a Texan. (Laughter) So what in justice's name am I owed? An apology? An explanation? A front-row seat to their torture _______? Maybe - not the last part - but maybe you are owed those things in general. Nine times out of ten, if you ask for those things, you will get them. Which is why forgiveness is not the right thing in most situations. Forgiveness is only right when waiting for what we're owed comes at too high a cost. In all those years, with that guy chained to my side, I got a lot done. I went to grad ______, I married a wonderful man, I started a ______ that I honestly really love. But I did it all a little more slowly, and I wasn't just dragging him along, I was dragging my mother and brother in the process, twisting the three of them up together in those chains. Pretty soon, that little posse _______ to crowd me out of my own body and my own experience. And one day, losing myself in order to punish him and keep the two of them _____ felt like too high a cost to bear. It was there, in that crossroads, when I knew what had happened to me. I knew what I was owed, and I decided than choosing myself was more important than being right. That's when I was ready to forgive. So I stepped away from Google, and I didn't ask any more _________, and I wrote him a letter. I tore unused pages out of my mom's journals, actually, and I _____. I told him that what happened on December 19th, 2008, was not okay and would probably never be okay for either of us. But just because it wasn't okay, that didn't mean he owed me anything - not an apology, not an ___________, not his role as my _______. I told him that I _____ to be _______ to one thing that happened to me one day. I _______ to be more, to be whole, and I didn't think that I could do that if I looked at another person and reduced him to one thing he did one day and made evil the sum of its parts. I told him that I wished him a lifetime full of _______ and that I forgave him. Then, without thinking, I plopped that letter into a _______ on the corner of Flatbush ______ and Church. For the first 10 steps, there was this lightness of being, and then that lightness started to feel like a lurch in your stomach, when you hit the spiritual tripwire. My chest unwound, it _____, and suddenly, I was alone with myself. I mean, really alone, giving birth to a stranger, saying hello to a girl that I hadn't ______ to in seven _____. (Sighs) Sometimes I miss him. (Laughter) Not him, the monster that I created. Things were a lot _______ and black and _____, but they were a lot simpler when I had a villain to fight, and more familiar. As long as he was around, mom and Jim were never that far away. They were __________, just ________, _______ in the wings, the rest of us on stage, talking about them. But my story was about the three of them, always. To get free, I had to get clear on exactly what ________ I was shredding. Once I did that, I found myself alone, center _____, in the spotlight, with endless possibilities. Real forgiveness has to let go of all expectations. You can't expect a certain outcome. You can't accept them to _____. You can't even expect to know who you're going to be on the other side of it. Forgiveness is really tricky. It's one of those tools that is only properly wielded when we have healed just enough that we have nothing left to lose. If you're still hemorrhaging in pain, it is too soon to forgive. If you can't roll up your ______ and show me your scars and tell me exactly what happened to you, it's still too soon to forgive. But it's never too late to let go of your villains and reclaim yourself. And if you're _____ to let it all go - the grief, the pain, the anger, the trauma - and you're open to _______ out who you are instead of always trying to prove yourself - I got to be honest with you - all this forgiveness hype is legit! (Laughter) Ten out of ten, five _____, would highly recommend. Thank you. (Applause)

Solution

harsher
forgiving
cheek
years
tells
hedge
realized
forgive
talking
light
vulnerable
healing
person
avenue
chamber
wading
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single
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wrote
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comfortable
murder
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contract
offstage
society
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reply
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mailbox
stage
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screaming
stars
burst
enemies
house
crying
assess
memories
career
thought
brother
villain
horror
white
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justice
bummer
emotional
ready
alive
letting
signing
connected
explanation
captive
reduced
hellish
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victims
relationship
rabbit
angry
messaging
reviews
stick
coming
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finding
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school
choose
characters
childhood
laughter
sucker
yearned

Original Text

In the summer of 2016, I did the sensible thing: I quit my cushy job at a hedge fund to write a play about my family's murder. (Sighs) I told my friends and family that this was about art, but in truth, I was on a spiritual vision quest. I was seeking closure to a relationship with someone that I barely knew - the kid who killed my mother and brother. He was my friend's younger brother, a kid from our neighborhood. He came over a handful of times to raid our family's snack cabinet. My mom actually used to wave to him from the van and say, "He's going through a hard time, I just want to make sure he knows that I see him." He broke into our house a couple of days before Christmas, looking for some stuff to sell for cash. When he came across my brother Jim asleep on the couch, he panicked, shot him and fled the scene. Then he realized he forgot his coat. By the time he came back, my mom had found Jim. Because he knew that she recognized him, and, to quote him, "Because she wouldn't stop screaming," he shot and killed her too. He is currently serving back-to-back life sentences in a prison in Southwestern Virginia. (Sighs) Over the course of the next seven years, I somehow managed not to hate him, but my grief and trauma did something a little bit weirder. He became a non-person to me. He wasn't a person, he was the face of all evil. He was the twister that came through and ripped up our house and threw it in some hellish version of Oz, but not a 17-year-old boy - or, I realized now, a 24-year-old man. A man who came of age in a cell, if he came of age at all. And as I set down to write the villain of my play and my life, I realized I had a name, some fractured childhood memories, a brief court document and nothing else to go on. So I went to the source of all answers, Google. I googled his prisoner ID number. That's when the internet sucker punched me in the face. Two thirds of prisoners in his penitentiary spend 23 hours a day in solitary confinement in eight-by-ten cells with slats for light. Conditions are so bad that in 2012 the entire prison went on a hunger strike. As I scrolled through case after case of human rights violations at this prison, suddenly, he became a person to me again. I remember the first time I saw mom and Jim's bodies in the funeral home, how my recoiled when I felt the small, destructive supernova that the bullet made in the back of Jim's skull. My mom's face just collapsed in on itself. Not her, just flesh and bones in that black dress we bought at Kohl's the week before. Those were my most painful memories. But when I pictured him - beaten, starving, crying out in a dark cell - yeah, that was somehow just as painful. And I realized it was because we were still connected. That steel tether of trauma that he hooked into my side when he killed them was still there, and I had been lurching against its pull and dragging him through the mud for the past seven years, whether I knew it or not. And it was with a little horror that I realized that he may have killed them, but I chose to keep us connected. So after wading through all the options - I mean, literally every option at my disposal - I realized the only way to get rid of this dude was to forgive him. That was a real bummer of a conclusion to come to. (Laughter) Because the truth was I thought that I already had forgiven him. I told my friends I forgave him; I told my family I forgave him; I even said "I forgive you" in the national news. So if saying you forgive someone is not the same thing as doing it, why was this guy still hooked into my side, dragging me around, making me do dumb things like quit my job to write a play? Turns out there is no fake it 'till you make it in forgiveness even though that's exactly what society expects us to do. So how do you forgive effectively, once and for all? That question started another Google rabbit hole, and then the theological rabbit hole, and then the Psychiatric-Journal and medical-journal rabbit hole until finally, my poor husband came home to a frantic wife, feral, just pacing the apartment, spewing statistics about forgiveness, like, "Did you know that there are 62 passages in the Bible with the word forgive and 27 with the word forgiveness? Not a single one tells you how to do it!" (Laughter) They just say how great it is! It's like the Nike of spiritual gifts: "Just do it!" (Laughter) And then there's this doctor Wayne guy over here, who says, "To forgive, we just got to let go and be like water." What does that mean? My husband approached me very cautiously. "Sweetie, what you doing?" (Laughter) "Trying to forgive the kid who killed my family, but nobody will tell me how." Oh, there are endless five-star historical Yelp reviews for forgiveness. The sales pitch is fantastic, but literally, What do I do? I think I was asking the wrong question, starting with how, when really what I needed to know was why. Why forgive? Why do it? That's when I discovered that most of us are forgiving for the wrong reasons. Some victims, like me, try to forgive right away because it's the right thing to do. But if we're honest with ourselves, there's only three reasons a victim forgives automatically. One: you think that forgiving quickly will make you a good person. That's an easy mistake to make, right? If forgiveness is good, a good person should forgive right away. But in all my research, I actually didn't find a timeline for forgiveness. Everybody was just really desperately urging us to get around to it because they knew we didn't want to. Even Jesus, when he talks about turning the other cheek, isn't talking about forgiveness. He's talking about non-violence. There has to be a middle ground between letting someone of the hook right away and going full an eye for an eye on them. Two: victims feel a lot of pressure to forgive from everyone else. It can come from your friends, from your family, from the media, from mixed up religious messaging. But the truth is, everyone wants you to forgive quickly so they can feel more comfortable, and they can move on. That's a crappy reason to do anything. Three: you think that forgiveness is a shortcut to healing. You think if you skip to the end of the story, you can bypass all the angry, vulnerable, messy healing crap. Spoiler alert: that one will come back to bite you in the butt. For me, it was all three reasons. I want to be a good person, I love pleasing other people, and I hate the vulnerable, angry, messy, healing crap. But it turns out that forgiveness is such a potent force that none of those reasons were strong enough to make it stick. Just like love. If your motivation is selfish, even a good selfish thing like healing, it will collapse in on itself like a dying star. So why do it? Why forgive? It can't heal you; it won't save you or the other person; it can't make you a good person - at least not all by itself - because that's not what forgiveness is designed to do. Forgiveness is designed to set you free. When you say, "I forgive you," what you're really saying is, "I know what you did. It's not okay, but I recognize that you are more than that. I don't want to hold us captive to this thing anymore. I can heal myself, and I don't need anything from you." After you say that, and you mean it, then it's just you. No chains, no prisoners. Just the good, the bad and the ugly of whoever that person was from the start. Our culture thinks that vengeance is freedom, but it is a total prison. Any act of violence, whether it's emotional or physical, is this weird, twisted form of intimacy. That's why the Greeks said that a death by a good man was a good death. Think about it. Every time somebody thinks about my mom and my brother, they think about the fact that they're not here, and then they think about the kid who did this. That one act of violence actually bound the three of them together in people's minds for eternity. When we choose vengeance, we're actually signing a blood oath to chain our story to our enemies for the rest of time. Forgiveness is the only real path to freedom. But to get free, you have to get super specific about what exactly it is that you're forgiving because you cannot forgive something that didn't happen to you. In my research, I came across this idea from Judaism that hit me in the chest. In Judaism, the family can't forgive murderers, because they were not killed. They can only forgive the pain, anguish and grief that the loss caused them. This was a total jackpot moment for me. I had to compartmentalize my damage: not what happened to mom and Jim, not what happened to my family, not what happened to society, what happened to me. This is why justice often feels really cold for victims. It's justice's job to assess what is owed. And it is the criminal justice system's job to assess what is owed to society. Not to victims. It is up to us to get really clear, individually, on what we are owed. You can't forgive your father for beating your mother. You can only forgive him for how sad, alienated and angry that made you feel. I couldn't forgive him for killing mom and Jim. I'm still here. I had to assess my damages. The wedding that I had without the two of them. The parts of me that my husband and kids will never get to understand without knowing the two of them. The way my life was supposed to start at 22, and he broke it. My inherent sense of safety and belonging, which, I got to be honest, I don't think are coming back. Those are my damages. Most of us avoid forgiveness like the plague because we do not want to look at our wounds. Wounds are scary, they are nasty, they are icky, it is why most of us look away when we donate blood. It is way easier to take all of that emotion and channel it into rage at another person. I got to be honest with you, I say: do it. (Laughter) You thought this would be about forgiveness, huh? It's an important part of the process. Anger is important; it is the fire that cauterizes our wounds and lets them scar over and heal. Too much anger, and yes, you'll get third-degree burns. Without a little bit of heat, you'll never scar over, and you'll never know exactly what happened to you. If you don't know what happened to you, you can't know what you're forgiving. But once you know what's happened to you, it's time for some good old-fashioned justice. Sorry, I married a Texan. (Laughter) So what in justice's name am I owed? An apology? An explanation? A front-row seat to their torture chamber? Maybe - not the last part - but maybe you are owed those things in general. Nine times out of ten, if you ask for those things, you will get them. Which is why forgiveness is not the right thing in most situations. Forgiveness is only right when waiting for what we're owed comes at too high a cost. In all those years, with that guy chained to my side, I got a lot done. I went to grad school, I married a wonderful man, I started a career that I honestly really love. But I did it all a little more slowly, and I wasn't just dragging him along, I was dragging my mother and brother in the process, twisting the three of them up together in those chains. Pretty soon, that little posse started to crowd me out of my own body and my own experience. And one day, losing myself in order to punish him and keep the two of them alive felt like too high a cost to bear. It was there, in that crossroads, when I knew what had happened to me. I knew what I was owed, and I decided than choosing myself was more important than being right. That's when I was ready to forgive. So I stepped away from Google, and I didn't ask any more questions, and I wrote him a letter. I tore unused pages out of my mom's journals, actually, and I wrote. I told him that what happened on December 19th, 2008, was not okay and would probably never be okay for either of us. But just because it wasn't okay, that didn't mean he owed me anything - not an apology, not an explanation, not his role as my villain. I told him that I hated to be reduced to one thing that happened to me one day. I yearned to be more, to be whole, and I didn't think that I could do that if I looked at another person and reduced him to one thing he did one day and made evil the sum of its parts. I told him that I wished him a lifetime full of healing and that I forgave him. Then, without thinking, I plopped that letter into a mailbox on the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Church. For the first 10 steps, there was this lightness of being, and then that lightness started to feel like a lurch in your stomach, when you hit the spiritual tripwire. My chest unwound, it burst, and suddenly, I was alone with myself. I mean, really alone, giving birth to a stranger, saying hello to a girl that I hadn't spoken to in seven years. (Sighs) Sometimes I miss him. (Laughter) Not him, the monster that I created. Things were a lot harsher and black and white, but they were a lot simpler when I had a villain to fight, and more familiar. As long as he was around, mom and Jim were never that far away. They were characters, just offstage, waiting in the wings, the rest of us on stage, talking about them. But my story was about the three of them, always. To get free, I had to get clear on exactly what contract I was shredding. Once I did that, I found myself alone, center stage, in the spotlight, with endless possibilities. Real forgiveness has to let go of all expectations. You can't expect a certain outcome. You can't accept them to reply. You can't even expect to know who you're going to be on the other side of it. Forgiveness is really tricky. It's one of those tools that is only properly wielded when we have healed just enough that we have nothing left to lose. If you're still hemorrhaging in pain, it is too soon to forgive. If you can't roll up your sleeve and show me your scars and tell me exactly what happened to you, it's still too soon to forgive. But it's never too late to let go of your villains and reclaim yourself. And if you're ready to let it all go - the grief, the pain, the anger, the trauma - and you're open to finding out who you are instead of always trying to prove yourself - I got to be honest with you - all this forgiveness hype is legit! (Laughter) Ten out of ten, five stars, would highly recommend. Thank you. (Applause)

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation	frequency
good person	3
healing crap	2

Important Words

accept
act
age
alienated
alive
anger
angry
anguish
answers
anymore
apartment
apology
applause
approached
art
asleep
assess
automatically
avenue
avoid
bad
barely
bear
beaten
beating
belonging
bible
birth
bit
bite
black
blood
bodies
body
bones
bought
bound
boy
broke
brother
bullet
bummer
burns
burst
butt
bypass
cabinet
captive
career
case
cash
caused
cauterizes
cautiously
cell
cells
center
chain
chained
chains
chamber
channel
characters
cheek
chest
childhood
choose
choosing
chose
christmas
church
clear
closure
coat
cold
collapse
collapsed
comfortable
coming
compartmentalize
conclusion
conditions
confinement
connected
contract
corner
cost
couch
couple
court
crap
crappy
created
criminal
crossroads
crowd
crying
culture
cushy
damages
dark
day
days
death
december
decided
designed
desperately
destructive
discovered
disposal
doctor
document
donate
dragging
dress
dude
dumb
dying
easier
easy
effectively
emotion
emotional
endless
enemies
entire
eternity
evil
expect
expectations
expects
experience
explanation
eye
face
fact
fake
familiar
family
fantastic
father
feel
feels
felt
feral
fight
finally
find
finding
fire
flatbush
fled
flesh
force
forgave
forgive
forgiven
forgiveness
forgives
forgiving
forgot
form
fractured
frantic
free
freedom
friends
full
fund
funeral
general
girl
giving
good
google
googled
grad
great
greeks
grief
ground
guy
handful
happen
happened
hard
harsher
hate
hated
heal
healed
healing
heat
hedge
hellish
hemorrhaging
high
highly
historical
hit
hold
hole
home
honest
honestly
hook
hooked
horror
hours
house
huh
human
hunger
husband
hype
icky
id
idea
important
individually
inherent
internet
intimacy
jackpot
jesus
jim
job
journals
judaism
justice
kid
kids
killed
killing
knew
knowing
late
laughter
left
lets
letter
letting
life
lifetime
light
lightness
literally
long
looked
lose
losing
loss
lot
love
lurch
lurching
mailbox
making
man
managed
married
media
memories
messaging
messy
middle
minds
mistake
mixed
mom
moment
monster
mother
motivation
move
mud
murder
murderers
nasty
national
needed
neighborhood
news
nike
number
oath
offstage
open
option
options
order
outcome
owed
oz
pacing
pages
pain
painful
panicked
part
parts
passages
path
penitentiary
people
person
physical
pictured
pitch
plague
play
pleasing
plopped
poor
posse
possibilities
potent
pressure
pretty
prison
prisoner
prisoners
process
properly
prove
pull
punched
punish
quest
question
questions
quickly
quit
quote
rabbit
rage
raid
ready
real
realized
reason
reasons
reclaim
recognize
recognized
recoiled
recommend
reduced
relationship
religious
remember
reply
research
rest
reviews
rid
rights
ripped
role
roll
sad
safety
sales
save
scar
scars
scary
scene
school
screaming
scrolled
seat
seeking
selfish
sell
sense
sentences
serving
set
shortcut
shot
show
shredding
side
sighs
signing
simpler
single
situations
skip
skull
slats
sleeve
slowly
small
snack
society
solitary
source
southwestern
specific
spend
spewing
spiritual
spoiler
spoken
spotlight
stage
star
stars
start
started
starting
starving
statistics
steel
stepped
steps
stick
stomach
stop
story
stranger
strike
strong
stuff
sucker
suddenly
sum
summer
super
supernova
supposed
talking
talks
tells
ten
tether
texan
theological
thinking
thinks
thirds
thought
threw
time
timeline
times
told
tools
tore
torture
total
trauma
tricky
tripwire
truth
turning
turns
twisted
twister
twisting
ugly
understand
unused
unwound
urging
van
vengeance
version
victim
victims
villain
villains
violations
violence
virginia
vision
vulnerable
wading
waiting
water
wave
wayne
wedding
week
weird
weirder
white
wielded
wife
wings
wished
wonderful
word
wounds
write
wrong
wrote
yeah
yearned
years
yelp
younger