I started this blog about working out, but it’s also about healing, mentally. As I reading Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality, which is like a Harry Potter fan fiction based on reason, I came across a passage the punched me in a stomach. It was about how Harry always thought the worst would happen, and Professor MacGonagall asked him if he was abused.

That’s my daughter, my teenager now. When she was ten, she started thinking the worst would happen and came to accept it. That was her world for three years–to expect the worst. When it did happen, she would be mentally prepared.  Yes, she was mentally abused by a coach, and it’s taken her time to heal. She was diagnosed with PTSS, and she worked through it.  She’s in a good place now–after four years. I am very proud of how she has worked through her issues: anxiety and low self-esteem.

I was so scared raising a daughter because I didn’t want her to experience confidence issues because it stays with you, but I threw her into a pit and let a coach mentally abuse her. I thought it was making her tough. There’s not a day that goes by that I live with the regret. If I could go back in time, if I could go back, I could change it.

I messed up. I messed her up, and I will forever be paying for it. However, she is healing and forgiving. I do not know how. She is so much stronger than I am. If she can heal, then perhaps I can. It will be a longer journey for me to find forgiveness.

A Buddhist Prayer of Forgiveness

If I have harmed any one in any way,
either knowingly or unknowingly
through my own confusions,
I ask their forgiveness.
If any one has harmed me in any way,
either knowingly or unknowingly
through their own confusions,
I forgive them.
And if there is a situation
I am not yet ready to forgive,
I forgive myself for that.
For all the ways that I harm myself,
negate, doubt, belittle myself,
judge or be unkind to myself,
through my own confusions,
I forgive myself.