A blog by Joyce Cordus and Frits Koster

“Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn’t know before you learned it.”
– Maya Angelou

We thought it would be nice to dedicate a blog to Maya Angelou (1928-2014). This African-American writer, poet, singer, dancer, civil rights activist and professor of American Studies went through a lot herself in her youth. She describes this openly in several novels with which she has won several awards. Her most famous work is the autobiographical “I know why the caged bird sings”. She has been an inspirational example to others, making her the first African-American woman to be depicted on a U.S. coin.

Maya Angelou has also paid much attention to the value of forgiveness. It seemed appropriate, therefore, to translate a pithy quote of hers into Dutch:

“I don’t know if, even today, I always like myself. But what I learned many years ago is to forgive myself. It is very important for every person to forgive themselves. Because if you live, you will make mistakes – that is inevitable. But when you have done that and you recognize this, you forgive yourself and say, “Ah, if I had known better, I would have done better. And that’s all. So you say to the people you think you’ve hurt, “I’m sorry,” and then you say to yourself, “I’m sorry. If we hold on to the error, then we cannot see our own glory in the mirror because we have the error between our face and the mirror. We cannot see what we are capable of. You can ask others for forgiveness, but in the end, true forgiveness lies within yourself. I think young people are so trapped in how they see themselves.

And note. When society sees them as unattractive, as a threat, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, it is painful. But you can transcend that. The real difficulty is to break through how you think about yourself. If we can’t do that then we never grow, never learn and certainly should never teach at all.”

And the latter, breaking through how you think about yourself, requires compassion for yourself. Looking at yourself with gentle eyes and accepting that things happen, that they are allowed to happen and do not always directly say something about how good or bad you are. Just because we are all human. And that we can all learn from our mistakes.

– Joyce Cordus and Frits Koster, October 2023