What immediately caught my attention was in your first paragraph: “Because of something I did, your life will never be the same.â€ I felt as if that what I've struggled with in terms of forgiveness. 

It is, of course, hard to deal with wanting to be forgiven for something, especially when my guilt and conscience is pecking away at me. But I've found, through my own experiences (and maybe b/c of who I am as a person) that it is extraordinarily hard to forgive someone else, even when I want to. You wrote about putting up walls. There's also the idea of not being able to let go - of the hurt, the pain, the anger, the sadness, or whatever other feelings came about because of the event/incident/etc. It's incredibly hard to let go, to say, "it's okay." Forgive and Forget is a nice idea in theory, but doesn't usually work out in the real world.

My two cents - offering forgiveness can only come when you're ready to forgive. I struggled for years to forgive my father, to accept the decisions he made that drastically changed my life. Even when I wanted nothing more than to forgive him, I still couldn't do it because I wasn't ready to really and truly accept what that forgiveness would mean - letting go of all of the emotions. But when I finally got to a point in my life when I was happy with where I was, I realized the holding on was holding me back. That's when I was ready to forgive and let go. It's a powerful experience and also very humbling. 

Thanks again for a fantastic post and for making me think. (Seriously - you always have the best posts!)