As I age (sometimes rather ungracefully) I am always surprised when a memory or a smell takes me back to a time in my life when everything was possible. There is an intake of breath, a gasp, that catch of recognition in which I usually have an uncontrollable urge to cry. Sometimes from joy, sometimes from sadness, sometimes it is simply from an acquiescence of facts from my past. What a person chooses to do with those memories makes the difference. For years I let my childhood trauma run my life until one day I stumbled upon a TikTok reel that hit me head on. Social media platforms are riddled with fake people, fake news, fake, fake, fake, but every once in a while, something hits home, and I needed some time to assess what I had watched.

Surviving trauma is one thing, carrying around its ghost like an old handbag you just can’t seem to part with is another. My closet has too many ghosts and not enough skeletons. I am happy to report; I have no scandals outstanding. Which brings me to what is currently going on in my everyday life. I always wonder where my overthinking, people pleasing, sadness, anger, disordered eating and snarky dark sarcastic humor comes from. I get it now. All of these things helped me survive my childhood traumas. Everyone has something, everyone. No one is free from traumatic events or terrible people. No one has the right to judge you about what you have personally been through, no one. How we choose to respond or develop is up to us. I only recently allowed myself to embrace this and to accept that it is okay not to rely on old coping mechanisms. I need to own my whys and move on from destructive behaviors. I have kept my life on a broken leash for so long I have spent a great portion of my life searching for peace I already own.

I am no longer a child. The time has come to let go of all the traumas I have carried around in secret for too long. I decided to separate myself from the little girl soul that did what she had to survive. I forgive you. I have learned from you, but it is time to heal. It is okay to let go. I no longer need to rely on those things. I learned to be a people pleaser because my mother was never happy with herself or anyone else. In her mind she was not enough, not good enough, not pretty enough, not loved enough, so no one else was ever enough for her. Her pain was so great that she never learned to love just because. Love because you can. Love because I am enough just as I am. Love because love by itself is enough. It is the perfect gift to be given or shared or inspired or? Love never dies, we do. Love is an action and a feeling. Love is the light in a dark room. Love is what brings people together, a magnet that draws you to its warmth, its beauty. I am on my path to better. I am accepting that my disordered eating is a leftover (no pun intended but hey, there it is) emotional pacifier. Eating should be about maintaining my life force and well-being and not for distraction.

I am pretty sure that I will be hanging onto my dark snarky humor because well, I do enjoy that. Sometimes I struggle with anger and sadness, but I no longer run away from those struggles. I am no longer angry or sad over the loss of what was once a very important friendship to me. When a friendship is built on sand it is likely to wash itself out at the first high tide. The old version of me would have apologized for the failure of that friendship but I now realize no one was at fault. We became different people on different paths searching for different adventures to carry us through. It has become what it is. We had some grand times whilst we were friends. I grew as a person in the years we were friendlies. I will never forget that.

Never Give Up On The Person You Are Meant To BE