Forgiveness as an Ongoing Practice

Forgiveness as an Ongoing Practice describes forgiveness as labor that must be undertaken repeatedly rather than a clean resolution reached once. Sugar connects self-forgiveness to the stories people tell about who they are, and gives the idea a physical form in a river ritual: she lets go of blades of grass standing for things she once stole. The concept also reaches beyond personal wrongdoing to the long work of making sense of family pain. In both contexts, forgiveness is neither a return to the past nor a claim that healing will be pure or complete; it is a practice of living differently with what happened.

Self-Forgiveness and the Story of the Self

Sugar’s advice to a correspondent who had stolen and lied begins by distinguishing healing from confession. She does not recommend retracing every act or seeking out the people whose belongings were taken. Instead, she argues that the correspondent needs to stop tormenting herself over things that no longer matter much. The obstacle, Sugar suggests, may lie in the story the correspondent continues to tell about herself: a narrative of wrongdoing can become an identity that keeps self-condemnation in place.

That story has a circular force. Sugar asks whether refusing to forgive oneself actually makes a person good, or whether persistent condemnation is another turn in the same cycle as the harmful behavior. The point is not that the wrongdoing should be denied. Rather, continuing to define the self through it may preserve the very pattern the person hopes to escape. Forgiveness offers a different account of the self, one that acknowledges past actions without making them the sole measure of a person’s character.

The argument is personal for Sugar. She says that writing about having stolen was difficult because the disclosure did not fit the person she wanted readers to see. She had written about other things she considered bad, but stealing seemed to threaten her preferred self-image. Her eventual admission that this, too, was part of the person she was accompanies her statement that she had forgiven herself. That disclosure makes the advice more than an abstract principle: Sugar presents forgiveness as a revision of self-understanding, not a denial of an uncomfortable part of one’s history.

The River Ritual

Years after she stopped stealing, Sugar sat alone beside a river and began picking a blade of grass for each thing she had taken. She dropped each blade into the water, naming specific objects in her thoughts: blue eye shadow, fancy soaps, a dog figurine, and a pretty sweater. With each release, she repeated the words “I am forgiven.” By the time the last of the remembered objects had been carried away, the repeated phrase felt believable.

The ritual turns an inward change into a sequence of concrete gestures. Each blade stands for a particular act, so forgiveness does not depend on pretending the past is vague or forgetting what happened. Yet the objects are not returned, and the ceremony is not presented as a search for the people who owned them. Its movement is away from endless self-punishment: one remembered item, one act of release, and one repetition of a different story about the self. The river carries the symbols onward, while the words give Sugar a way to imagine herself beyond the identity of thief.

Repetition, Setback, and Healing

Sugar is careful not to present the river scene as a permanent cure. She says that she continued to grapple with the past afterward, and compares forgiveness not to something attractive that can simply be encountered and possessed, but to a burdensome figure that must be hauled uphill. The image makes the effort deliberately unglamorous. Forgiveness has to be said again and again before it becomes a story a person can believe, and even then it remains work rather than a finished achievement.

This recurrence shapes Sugar’s broader account of change. Resolving childhood issues in one’s twenties does not mean they are settled forever; what has been worked through may need to be worked through again. Age brings forms of knowledge that could not have been reached earlier, and Sugar says that much of this later understanding concerns forgiveness. The repetitions do not prove that earlier healing was false. They show that understanding and self-relation continue to change, and that a past wound can return to consciousness without requiring a person to begin from nothing.

Sugar also resists the idea that healing should be perfectly clean. She suggests that people want to imagine it as pure and flawless, like a new baby held in the hands, but identifies healing with a mixture of emotions rather than an ideal state. Her account permits happiness, grief, anger, gratitude, acceptance, and dismay to coexist. Forgiveness belongs to that complicated condition: it does not erase sorrow or make the past beautiful, but can allow a person to live with what cannot be undone.

Family History and the Work of Forgiveness

Sugar extends the same uneven process to the relationship with an abusive father. Cutting off communication is a boundary: it expresses a decision not to accept mistreatment. But she distinguishes that decisive act from the longer emotional work that follows. Leaving the relationship does not mean the inner relationship is finished; coming to terms with a father, and with a mother, may take years and involve anger, forgiveness, acceptance, letting go, sorrow, and even complicated joy. These responses do not proceed in a straight line. They recur, overlap, and can return with renewed force.

Sugar’s reflections hold open the possibility of change without promising reconciliation or excusing cruelty. Some childhood facts remain immutable, and a father’s cruelty may never make sense in a complete way. Yet Sugar argues that work, mindfulness, understanding, and heart can change how a person makes sense of him. The distinction matters: forgiveness is not the same as surrendering a boundary or guaranteeing a good relationship. It is part of a continuing effort to live with family origins without allowing them to dictate every future response.

The metaphor of the empty bowl gives this effort a lasting shape. A parent remains part of an origin story, Sugar suggests, and the bowl must be filled again and again. In a reflection written just before her thirty-ninth birthday, she recalls imagining the circumstances of her birth, then sitting on a park bench after what had just transpired. She describes holding together many conflicting feelings and recognizes that survival and future flourishing may come not in spite of losses and sorrows but through living with them. The ending does not resolve family history into uncomplicated peace: Sugar says that she filled her father’s empty bowl one last time and thought that he was finally rid of her. The force of the moment lies in its unresolved emotional mixture, not in a claim that the past has been undone.

Narrative Significance

Across the theft narrative, the estrangement from her father, and her later reflections on age, Sugar gives forgiveness a recurring rather than terminal structure. The river ritual offers a concentrated scene of release, but its meaning is qualified by the later insistence that forgiveness must be practiced again. Similarly, setting a boundary can be necessary even while the emotional reckoning continues. These paired ideas keep forgiveness from becoming either an order to reconcile or a promise of instant relief.

The concept also links personal change to narrative identity. Sugar’s challenge is to stop treating a single account of the past—whether the account of a thief or the child of a cruel father—as the whole truth about a person. Repeatedly saying that one is forgiven, and returning to unresolved family pain with changed understanding, are acts of telling a life differently. In Sugar’s account, forgiveness remains ongoing precisely because people and their understanding of the past keep unfolding.