Your life has been profoundly shaken by these recent revelations. It’s not your task to immediately forgive those who shook you. Your spoken desire to forgive the woman who betrayed you is in opposition to what you feel. Forgiveness forces an impossible internal face-off between you and a woman you hate.

Acceptance asks only that you embrace what’s true. You’re so outraged and surprised that this shitty thing happened to you that there’s a piece of you that isn’t yet convinced it did. You’re looking for the explanation, the loophole, the bright twist in the dark tale that reverses its course. Anyone would be. It’s the reason I’ve had to narrate my own stories of injustice about seven thousand times, as if by raging about it once more the story will change and by the end of it I won’t still be the woman hanging on the end of the line.

But it won’t change, for me or for you or for anyone who has ever been wronged, which is everyone. We are all at some point—and usually at many points over the course of a life—the woman hanging on the end of the line. Allow your acceptance of that to be a transformative experience. You do that by simply looking it square in the face and then moving on. You don’t have to move fast or far. You can go just an inch. You can mark your progress breath by breath.

– Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life From Dear Sugar

I finished the book before the new year. It had something to say for most problems imaginable: mine, a friend’s, my parent’s. I know for a fact that so many things happened to people I know and not just to myself.

This was how I used to feel: if I said my story often enough, something will change. They will feel sorry, they will understand, that I will have answers. But that never happened. I felt so frustrated and angry — at them for what they did and at myself for the person I became because of it. That I have feelings and struggles that I can no longer control as easily, problems that I didn’t have until them. Angry and hateful that I will always have to carry them in my heart because most of the things I feel (used to feel more keenly and sharply, but pain ebbs a way little by little with time) are directly linked to them. As if years and years later there is no escape.

But the book and all its compiled pieces of advice are just some of the things I have to tell myself so I can learn, so I can believe, so I can accept and change.

Here: a new year. Here: another year of learning to move on.