I Forgave My Rapist. Should You?

On learning that anger and grace don't cancel each other out

I forgave my rapist this week and I’m still so, SO angry at him that sometimes I have to pull over on the highway because a song that played that night comes on and I instantaneously puke all over my car.

Both of these things are true at the same time. They coexist in my heart parasitically. They’re poltergeists I’ll never escape: the innocent and the maimed.

For the longest time, I thought the poltergeists defined me. I genuinely, wholeheartedly believed that I was a haunted being. Inexorcisable, if you will. I constantly battled the idea that forgiveness meant my anger would become invalid. That my experience would dissolve into nothing. That if I still wanted to scream into the void about what he took from me, then maybe I hadn’t actually forgiven him at all.

Then, knees deep in a co-reading of the Bhagvad Gita and the Bible, it hit me: What if forgiveness and fury aren’t opposites? What if they’re just two different types of truth that can coexist in the same body without negating each other? What if my ghosts were poltergeists by perception instead of in reality?