I used to think forgiveness was easy. I preached about it all the time. I used to uplift it like it was the most important thing. They say that forgiveness is for the forgiver and not for the offender after all, the offender in most cases is not even bothered about the wrong they did. I was once told that when you fail to forgive and you harbor the hatred, it will keep stored somewhere in your heart and it would never be healthy on your part. 
There is one thing I had ignored though. Forgiveness is the hardest thing any person could do. For Ann ( real name withheld) , forgiveness was never the way to get over her pain and anger. The kind of anger she had however would destroy her.
Ann had failed to forgive her father. She had a deep seated hatred for him. Everyone around Ann knew how much she loathed her father. Any memory of him, any mention of him would always throw her into a frenzy.
We all knew her father had abandoned her and she had never quite received any love from her mother. Every time her mother saw Ann, she said she looked exactly like her dad and she could never accept her because just by looking at her daughter, she would re live the misery she went through with Ann’s dad.
This made Ann angrier. How did she look like her father? She could not accept that. Ann’s mother was too absent from her daughter’s life so she even failed to notice that Ann hated her dad probably more than her mother ever could hate him. There were many times I tried to get Ann to talk about her father, to try to forgive him but it always seemed to threaten our friendship whenever I did.
“You do not understand because you are not in my shoes. No matter how much I try, I can never forgive that man.” She would always say to me.
Later, Ann finally opened up to me. It was after a very long time of course. She finally told me how she had looked for her father despite his absence. She said she regretted looking for him because when she begged for his love and acceptance, he offered love in a very twisted way.He had raped her. Not only had he taken her innocence but he had shattered her pride, her heart and her trust.
“How can I start to forgive him?” she asked me while gritting her teeth.
I understood that I knew so little all along and I didn’t know how I could ever stand the thought of being raped by my own father. No matter how much I had thought I would always be willing to forgive, I finally accepted the fact that it was never easy to let go, forgive and very impossible to forget.
