Is it possible to really forgive and forget?

I think it's definitely possible. I don't honestly understand why people insist on holding onto all the bad stuff. I tend to just move on. I'm always seeing threads on here where people are asked to sort of catalog the wrongs they've suffered--what's the most homophobic thing your family said to you, etc. And because I like to participate when I have time I usually sit down and try to come up with something to write. And I really can't think of anything. I mean I've been alive for 46 years. I've been out for more than half of it. I've spent a good portion of it in times and places which were not at all conducive to being gay. I even tried to kill myself my senior year in high school so I know some really negative stuff went down but when I really sit down and try to catalogue it, in all honesty... I forget. Instead I remember all the wonderful experiences and people, all the ways I was loved and supported, comforted and entertained. I guess in a way it's gotten so that I do it without thinking about it. I think people are fundamentally good. Occasionally, but honestly rarely, I am disappointed... and when it happens I just move on.

For me this is exactly why you have to forget. For me the forgetting is the truly powerful part of the forgiving. I think you forgive for other people. People screw up, people change and to be honest I think there is a moral imperative to forgive--for other people. For yourself, you forget--specifically so that you don't get bogged down in all those "precautions". People think those precautions protect them but it seems to me that they just wall them off. I suppose they protect people, but mainly from being open or genuine or vulnerable. I can't imagine filtering every new interaction through such a list of wrongs.

Anyway, I guess that's how I see it...