You have to stop looking backwards. You have to stop defining yourself based on what happened to you or to the universe yesterday. Everything that has momentum, including your life, moves in the forward direction. You shouldn’t want to stay stuck, mired in guilt or regret or hopes or dreams of a once-upon-a-time or futures lost.
With every dawn comes a new daring opportunity. You either take it, or you don’t. You either live it, or you don’t. You allow yourself to breathe freely, or you don’t. You think you don’t have a choice. You believe you are a victim of your circumstance. But you can stop believing that.
Stop letting a perfect life define you. Stop letting your faults define you. Stop believing that pain and hurt and struggle is the primary theme of your life. You can let go. You can let go of everything that stops you from growing. You just have to forgive yourself. You just have to love yourself. You just have to give yourself a chance.
I am now choosing to give myself a chance. After a year, filled not only with turmoil and uncertainty but with anxiety, pain and loss, and most of all with death, I am choosing to let go of everything that haunts me. I am choosing to release my ghosts. I am choosing to stop dying, and give myself a chance to live.
I will, by the end of this, be labelled a lot of things. I have to give up my darling dog for re-adoption who is truly my baby. I have to recalibrate my truths. I have to alter the course of my future. I have to win my own ticket to freedom, make my own home, own up to living with people who may cause me pain, and yet belong to me. I have to take on responsibility. I have to stop seeing inaction or lethargy or hopelessness as the way forward. I have to take on a difficult journey. I have to live with the fact that I have lost forever, somebody I loved very much. I have to pick up pieces of me and build a me that matters. I have to find my own meaning and bring meaning to others.
I will end up making mistakes. I will end up being on the wrong side of the table. I will end up having to choose between difficult things. I will have to give up a lot of things I love.
But I have to take this journey. I have to take myself to a happier place. I have to redefine myself, not on the basis of my emotions, but on the basis of the reality of my world.
If you are reading this, whoever you may be, take this journey with me. We don’t have to know each other, but we just have to know that difficult times don’t have to define us forever. If this year, or this phase or any part of your life has felt like an impossibility, know that I get it. I am here, with you. And I know I am not alone. Neither are you.
If you are struggling, through anything in this moment, share your pain. A stranger, a friend, a lover it matters not. Bring out to the surface that which you have bottled up. I am going to be doing that. Here, on this blog, the one I abandoned in the past few months because of immense pain. But I am back now, and I will be back most days, because I am ready to let go of my pain. I am ready to grow despite the worst that has happened. I am going to get up and get ready.
You should try to too.
Find your release. With whomever, whenever. Online, offline. On your own blog, on my blog. Find your self. Find your voice. Don’t let yourself fade away.
This is important. I am going to remember it, every night when I go to sleep, every day when I wake up.
You should try to remember it too.
We can restart.
We have to.
We should.