Never Forgive, Never Forget

 Never Forgive, Never Forget

As a child, I was taught—like many others—to forgive and forget. It came wrapped in the language of morality, kindness, and virtue. Religion urged us to turn the other cheek. Schools encouraged us to be the “bigger person.” Families taught us to keep the peace, to move on, and to not hold grudges. Every institution, every cultural narrative, seemed invested in erasing the memory of pain, no matter how deep it ran.

But as I grew older—and especially as I lived through the experience of violence—those teachings began to ring hollow. The more I tried to forgive, the more invisible my pain became. The more I tried to forget, the more my body remembered. The scars did not fade with time. The hurt did not dilute into wisdom. In fact, the pressure to "heal" through forgetting felt like another form of violence—this time, psychological. A quiet silence wrapped in the language of peace.

As a survivor of violence, I began to question everything I had been taught. Forgiveness was not liberating—it was demanded. Forgetting was not healing—it was forced. Society doesn’t ask perpetrators to change or to remember what they’ve done; it demands that survivors carry the burden of moving on. We are told to forgive so that they can feel comfortable, and to forget so that they are not held accountable. In this way, "forgive and forget" is not a path to healing—it is the language of the oppressor.

In my work as a lawyer and social worker, I hear the pain of women every day. Their stories, spoken through trembling voices or buried beneath layers of shame and silence, awaken the rage I carry inside me—rage that is not just mine, but shared. When I listen to these stories, I feel a deep clarity: this anger is not a weakness. It is a memory. It is a refusal to allow what happened to us to be erased. It is a declaration that the past matters—that what was done to us should not be smoothed over in the name of social comfort or institutional convenience.

“Forgive and forget” is a luxury for those who have not suffered. It is a strategy of denial, a performance of civility that enables abuse to continue unchecked. It erases the long shadow that violence casts across a survivor’s life. It sanitizes injustice. It allows systems of power—patriarchy, caste, class, racism—to remain intact, because memory is dangerous to power. Memory is revolutionary.

Survivors speak a different language. A truer language. One that does not flinch in the face of discomfort. We say: Never forgive. Never forget.

We do not say this because we are cruel or bitter. We say it because remembering is how we survive. We say it because justice begins with memory. We say it because forgiveness, when demanded rather than earned, is another form of subjugation.

To never forget is not to wallow in the past—it is to name it. To give it shape. To claim our truths without shame. To never forgive is not to live in hate—it is to insist on accountability. It is to say: what happened was wrong, and no amount of time or social pressure can make it right.

This language disrupts the narrative of the “strong, silent survivor.” It unsettles those who would rather look away. But as survivors, we owe it to ourselves and to each other to speak it. Because forgetting does not bring peace—it only guarantees that history will repeat itself.

So we remember. We name names. We tell our stories. We pass them down. We keep the memory of our pain alive, not because we are broken, but because we are whole enough to refuse to lie.

Never forgive. Never forget.
This is the language of survival.
This is the beginning of justice.
This is how we build a world where no one is ever asked to forget what they had to survive.