On Letting Go

I’m going to make this short and sweet. I’ve felt quite rotten these last few days.

Flustered. Distracted.Unmotivated.

Have you ever tried to escape something, or let it go somehow, yet it finds its way back to you?

For me, whether in dreams or in actual reality, it manages to creep back in. And sometimes it’s at the most inconvenient of times. Actually, I can’t think of a time when it would be convenient, since I am trying to avoid the thing after all. Now “it” can be more than one thing, of course. “It” could be people, memories, a bad habit. Usually when I’m feeling rotten, I don’t want to do anything at all. I want to be nothing, do nothing, go nowhere. But this time I chose to harness that rottenness and work on this ongoing fictional piece I started 4 years ago. It started out as an idea for a novel, though I don’t even know if it’s going to be a novel, or anything at all for that matter.

Anyway. While digging up all my scattered notes written on limp napkins and stained paper scraps, I discovered all these other things I had written. Dark things. Sad things. Things I really didn’t want to revisit. I didn’t feel like going into those spaces, but I thought, maybe I should force myself to go back there, you know, to spark the creative life out of that stagnant part of my creative brain. Though after reading through a lot of it, I started to feel uncomfortable. Still, I kept reading because I was trying to, how do I put this, place a hot iron over a bloody wound. But then I thought, “Now wait just a minute. I don’t have to force myself to do anything. I don’t want to revisit these old spaces, so I won’t.” Even though I was in a bit of a daze from being transferred back into those feelings, I pushed my way past the gauze and I gathered up those scattered notes and slid them back into the folder I kept them in. I don’t want to revisit those demons, and I don’t have to.

I don’t want to relive the past. I’m done being stuck and unable to move on. I’m sick of nostalgia. For so long I let myself mourn over the past, over things I wish I would have done — or would not have done — or things I wish I could still do, or the youth that I feel has left me. Cheesy and “new age-y” as this may sound, I’ve discovered a new path I want to travel on. (Note, I am definitely not new age-y.)

I want to travel on a path that looks ahead, and not behind. A road that looks at the good and beautiful things I have in my life right now, the things that have made me truly and genuinely happy. I’ve longed to say that word and actually mean it. I’ve discovered this incredible peace and joy, and no past memory on earth can take that from me. So I’m going to dust away those unwanted tracks I’ve left in the dirt behind me and only focus on the good parts of my past, the parts that involve my childhood and my family. And I am going to focus on the new tracks I’m making now in my young adulthood, with my new friends and family.

So farewell old baggage. I won’t think of you fondly. Ain’t nobody got time for that 😉

Until next,