No ones past is too heavy
I believe that no ones past is heavy enough to keep them from a bright future. Bold statement, I know. And, to be perfectly honest, I haven’t always believed it. My own past once felt like an insurmountable pile of shit trying to drown me and any shred of hope I clung to!
We all have a past. Some of us have pasts that leave us with nothing but smiles and laughter and the occasional wince and shiver. Lessons learned, good times had!
Others of us have pasts that leave us wide awake at night, staring at the ceiling and trapped in a nightmarish Catch-22 where we’re doing painful and unspeakable things to try and feel something, anything, and simultaneously searching the bottoms of countless bottles for thecureto feeling anything. Some of us have pasts that make us wonder why we should give the future a chance. A chance to transform into the same flavor of past that has hurt us to this point. Even worse, some of us wonder why we should give ourselves a chance. Since we just keep hurting everyone around us. Because everything we touch turns to ash in our hands. We feel like our past has transformed us into an irredeemable monster that can’t stop destroying.
Its up to us
At the risk of over-simplifying, I want to say that whether our pasts are cesspools or compost is entirely determined by how we choose to use them. I know how hard of a pill that is to swallow. I remember when someone said something like that to me, and I felt so angry. “Are you saying I WANT to feel this way? Are you trying to tell me that I am CHOOSING to be miserable and hurt? I didn’t ask for this life! I didn’t ask to be beaten, molested, manipulated. It’s not like I wanted my dad to be murdered. Or my mom to die an agonizing death from a cancer that took six long years to finally finish her off. No. My past is out of my control and I don’t want to be as fucked up as I am but I can’t help it. I’m trying!” It’s all still right there for me. It almost makes me want to cry those angry tears again, and feel overwhelmed by circumstances that I couldn’t control.
And then, one day I started feeling tired of my life and how I felt. I asked myself how else I could look at things. I don’t know why the change happened, I’ve been asking myself for years. But I began to think, maybe I could use my past and my trauma for good. Maybe every single obstacle that I ran into, keeping me caged, was a doorway into an entire universe of learning and opportunity. Maybe (and I really hated this idea, it cut my pride deeper than anything EVER), just maybe, it really was a matter of how I looked at it. Could it be that I had the power to choose how my past ultimately affected me?
Me writing this, right now, is proof that all those maybes were true. I am trying to make my life an offer of hope to people who still believe that their past is why they can’t, instead of why they can.
My advice
If anyone every came to me and asked me for my advice for getting out from underneath a crushing past, I would tell them to start asking questions. Start poking at the walls of their cage and see where it gives. Where do the bars flex, which walls are just illusions, what windows open? And most of all…find out how you are holding yourself back.
For me, it was that pride I mentioned. I would almost rather die that admit that I could just walk away from the enormous amount of pain I was experiencing. I may not have put myself in my jail cell, but I sure had the fucking key the whole time! Perhaps I’m not the fire that is burning me alive, but the fire extinguisher was literally in my hands the whole time. And I almost didn’t use it! Just because I was too embarrassed to admit that I just couldn’t see how to escape before. That would be like losing your glasses, asking everyone for help finding them, and when someone points out that they’ve been sitting on ya damn head the whole time you refuse to check because you don’t want to face the embarrassment.
The worst part of all
And you know what’s even worse than the prospect of me never being free of my past and trauma? All the people that I could have reached; all the impact that I could have had on this world would never come to be. So the sooner I got over myself, the sooner I could start using the soil of my past to plant a garden to feed everyone I might reach.
No matter where you are in this journey, you are where you are meant to be right now. Other than the undeniably vast importance of everything else I’ve said so far, the OTHER other most important thing is to not judge yourself. You are where you are, and that’s ok. Be kind to yourself, or the fire extinguisher won’t work. I don’t know how the physics works in that example, you just gotta know its true. Compassion is not just for others, its for you too! Much love to you all.