My little sister got engaged tonight.
Sounds like I'm talking about a 7 year old, doesn't it? I'm not. My little sister is 31 - 5 years (nearly to the day) younger than I am.
But sometimes, she's still that annoying 9 year old who hovered in our - much to both of our disappointments - shared bedroom when I was trying to hang out with my first high school boyfriend. So when a big life moment like this happens to her, I get this weird twinge of melancholy amidst the happiness and excitement. Shit, I can't imagine what I'm going to do when she has a baby - probably cry, something I didn't do when my own kid was born! I'm a mess.
It's funny, the timing of things. I was having a somewhat anxious day (not because of the impending engagement - oh yeah, I should mention that I did know this was coming and I have been sitting on this secret for weeks).
No, the anxiety was my own, borne of the last several months and a whole host of introspection I've been doing - as usual.
I was thinking about how we deal with what's happened to us in the past - how we learn to deal with, accept, and heal from past experiences, hurts, you name it. I was thinking about this because I'm struggling a bit right now.
One of the things that is a challenge, at least in my Type A, detail-oriented mind, is learning how to accept that you may not ever fully understand the details of what happened, or why it happened, only that it hurt and that you have to figure out what to do about it.
My problem is, I don't process things well when I don't have all the facts or all the details. Every subject in my mind is like a grid - and I need that grid to be completely filled out, so I feel that I have a complete picture.
Yeah, that's great - except, let's face it, that's not going to happen in life. You're never going to have a complete picture and, for that matter, you're never going to get a full understanding. There will be gaps.
The gaps make me nuts. Why? Because my brain - my very OCD brain - wants to fill them in. It obsesses about the gaps. They make me, literally sometimes, crazy.
That's what prompted the introspection today. I've experienced something in my past that I have now come to accept happened and I can't control that it happened, as much as I'd like. I know enough details for the hurt to have been pointed and real and cause this ache in my heart that will be there for a long time, maybe forever.
But I'm ready to have that ache turn dull. It's becoming a bit duller than it was for a while. Slowly. That involves a lot of breathing and a lot of patience and - frankly, just time. The cliche that time heals all wounds is just that, a cliche. But I'll give you this - time at least helps the wound stop bleeding. That's something.
So in my quest to heal, at least a little...I've been processing.
I have this distinct disadvantage of being an overthinker and being extremely methodical and logical (which is totally contradictory to the fact that I'm also SUPER emotional). When something happens to me that makes me hurt, I just try to put it together and come up with logic to help me NOT hurt.
I'm having a hell of a time doing that this time. In fact, I'm an abject failure in doing it.
There's no fucking logic I can put to this one, and my super logical mind is screaming over it.
This, in turn, is driving me to try to fill in the gaps. This grid, in this instance, looks like an empty crossword puzzle. The only pieces filled in are those weird black squares (why the hell are they there anyway? Draw the damn thing differently!!). That's it.
That's not much.
The black squares give me the information I need to feel like shit. But the gaps...
.,..they're laughing at me. "You just try to fill them in. Go ahead. Torture yourself. What you've dealt with isn't enough. Go for it. Find the answers. You think you can. Do you really want to?"
So after doing this to myself for WAY too long, I came to the command decision today.
No more.
The way to heal isn't to torture myself with the questions for which I will never every have answers - or would never want answers. That's just going to give me much much more pain. I can't answer them and neither can anyone else.
I need to choose to look forward.
DUH, right?
This is so so so so hard for me.
And yet, finally, in my 37th year, I have realized that this is what I have to do - about so many of the things that have happened to me - yesterday, last year, 10 years ago, as a little kid. I have all these dark clouds, this half-complete grids - they are the ghosts that haunt me, taunt me, and make me lose my mind.
It's time to bury them.
I can't change what happened in any of those instances.
And dwelling on it, turning it over in my head, thinking of every minutae and trying to figure out the what and the why of it - it's getting me nowhere. Fast.
So I resolve, today - to be done with that.
Things happen. They just do. No matter who you are or what you do or how hard you try or how much you love or how diligently you attempt to avoid failure.
They do.
You can dwell on them and stew in them and break a little bit more each day. Or you can feel them and then try to learn from them and let them go.
I have to stop stewing. I've done so much of it, I'm stuck in a quagmire of shit, and I can't make decisions or breathe or live. No more. Period.
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