You Have to Forgive Yourself Before You Can Forgive Anyone Else
Forgiveness of other people starts somewhere closer to home than most of us admit. If you can't picture yourself ever needing forgiveness, how are you supposed to grasp what it means to hand it to somebody who hurt you? Every one of us has done things that call for it. Oddly, a lot of people find it simpler to extend forgiveness outward than to turn it inward on themselves.
Think about whether you're the kind of person who's hard on yourself. You may not be the holiest soul walking around, but that doesn't make you the most unforgivable one either. There's something strange about offering others a thing you've quietly decided you don't deserve. Once you can sit with your own need for it, the whole idea of forgiving another person starts to make sense. We all need it. Recognizing that about ourselves is what teaches us how to give it away.
There's a flip side worth sitting with. Some people feel wonderful about forgiving others precisely because they're convinced they have nothing to be forgiven for. It carries a faint holier-than-thou flavor. The reasoning goes something like this: "Me? Forgive myself for what? The very fact that I can let other people off the hook proves I'm not the one with a problem." Being generous with forgiveness becomes a way of quietly ranking yourself above the people you're pardoning.
What this comes down to is that both directions matter. You have to look at the things you owe yourself forgiveness for and the things you need to release in others. Consider the hardest version of the problem: a person who was physically or sexually abused as a child and later does the same thing to children. Most readers won't have gone that far. But almost anyone can point to foolish choices, maybe even reckless ones, that caused real damage. If you can't own what you did and forgive yourself for it, that unresolved weight will block you from genuinely forgiving the person who wronged you.
Nobody's perfect. If anyone were, the rest of us probably wouldn't be here at all. You can take that with or without any belief in original sin.