The Thing About Pain..

My people.

I have been away, I know. I literally haven’t caught a breath in the last two months or so. Life has been moving at the speed of light and it’s all I can do to catch up.

From the first day I started this blog, I have left a piece of me in every post I have ever written, over one hundred and counting and this one won’t be any different.

So I’ve been in some amount of pain recently and I was forced to be brave, to remove the rose tinted glasses and to look at things for what they really are because that to me is how I make sense of the things I’m feeling. Sometimes when I’m in pain, it’s one of two things. 1. This pain happened to me because, life. I had no hand in causing it, probably didn’t deserve it but still, it hurts. 2. I walked into a potentially painful situation with my rose tinted glasses in place, ignoring glaring warning signs and telling myself everything will be just fine and then boom! Pain. I’ll be a little vulnerable today and share how I’ve dealt with those two kinds of pain recently.

A few months ago, someone I thought was my friend hurt me very badly, I can’t even find the words to begin to explain how hurt and let down I was. I genuinely thought I was being myself with my friend, little did I know I was being made a fool of in the worst way possible. I will spare you the sordid details but the truth is that it hurt, a lot. I can sincerely tell you that I have forgiven and I’m working really hard to forget first because it’s what God expects of me and also because I have hurt people before and they forgave me so why shouldn’t I? But still pain is pain and this one stung quite a bit.

Now the next one. For the past fifteen years or so, I have gone back and forth with this one person. If there was a world record for trying to make it work, we’d hold it. We have tried and tried and tried and finally admitted that we failed. He’s moved on, as much a human can move on from a fellow human but did I do the same? No. Rose tinted glasses firmly in place, I’d keep trying to gather ashes and fan a flame that had for all intents and purposes died out. I thought I needed closure but what is closure? Really? For me closure was the excuse I gave myself not to let go. There probably will never be a grand, life changing moment when you realize you need to let go, you just know. There has to come a time when enough is enough. You have to put on your big girl pants and apologize to yourself for hanging around and accepting pain that you could have lived without. You need to look in the mirror literally or figuratively and tell yourself you screwed up, accept your portion of the blame, and remind yourself that your life is for living and then live. Nobody asked me not to move on, nobody made me stay, nobody told me not to gather myself and forge ahead, these were decisions I made and while I have paid for them it’s time to move on. You just know, it just clicks in your head. Yes some days I feel utterly stupid, yes some days I can barely face myself when I think about the sheer lack of self respect with which I handled myself and the situation but so what? What’s done really is done. The truth is that it wasn’t meant to be and that’s okay. There are many more chapters to write, flip the page and and see what you find.

The thing about my pain was that I didn’t feel it, so it filled me. I have learned to mourn my mistakes and to let them go. What ever it takes is what I do, a day off from work, a long walk, a good cry, a bowl of ice cream, a sappy movie, whatever it takes to help me feel that pain, I feel it, all of it. The weight of my failure and the bitter taste of regret. I feel them and then I shake them off and keep it pushing. Then I start to see the sun again. Little by little the dark clouds lift off, slowly but surely it stops hurting, it gets easy to delete the text threads and keep scrolling, and one day I look up and realize that the pain is gone. Once in a while it’ll walk past my mind again, I’m human, but there’s been a shift, it can hurt but now I’m strong enough to let it go.

Two thoughts before I quit rambling: 1.) I have just now realized that I didn’t write a birthday post for my 31st last month, I shall fix that. 2) some days I feel so guilty about not writing often that I just want to shut down this blog and run away, don’t let me run my people.

Have you made any mistakes or felt any pain lately? Don’t let it simmer, work it out and claim your peace. Let it go. It’s that easy. Right now my favorite quote on Earth is: ” The sun will rise, and we will try again.”