"once you choose hope, anything is possible"

Friday, May 30, 2014

it's a love/hate relationship

It's been a weird week as I am sure many could tell from my last post. The best way I can describe it is that I've been in a funk. Not sad, not happy, not really anything, just weird. So I wrote my last blog post and felt okay about it, but then I read it again and I hated it. I hated what I said, hated what I meant, hated that I had to even write it because I hated that I felt it. I hate that the past is still so much a part of me. I feel like I am constantly at battle between letting the past make me who I am, and letting it run my life today. I am always hearing conflicting things about not looking back, but at the same time never forgetting where you came from. Like, what? That's confusing and the world needs to stop being so confusing. Everyone has a different opinion on how to handle the past and this week, after writing, I was mad at myself for looking back so much. I was mad at letting myself be hurt by something that happened months ago and I was mad that it still had the power to make me sad and minimize all the progress I felt like I had made in fixing my broken heart.
 
And then Maya Angelou died.
 
I spent hours rereading some of her greatest quotes, her little pieces of wisdom that she shared with the world through her writing. Maybe it's because she was a dancer, or maybe it's because she wrote amazing works of art that I can only dream about writing, or maybe its because her poems and her speeches spoke to my soul, but Maya Angelou could bring me to tears any minute of any day and she could get me to stop, and really think, and even sometimes listen to what she was saying. So I paged through my notebooks that are lined with Maya Angelou quotes that I have read and been inspired by, and I sorted through thousands of social media postings about this literary hero that the world lost too soon, and I found the quote I was looking for. I found the little snippet of wisdom that helped me stop being so mad at myself for being affected by my past.
 


I hate looking back. I hate seeing the endlessly happy carefree girl I was one year ago today. I hate looking at the pictures and I hate reading my writing and I hate that I can't go back. But I love who I am today. I love my independence, and I love my friends. I love my job and my city and my family. I love the way my future looks and I love the feeling I get when I think about that future. I love the confidence I feel every morning and I love that for the first time in my life I am 100% happy with the person I am. I love all that knowing that I wouldn't be here today if the past didn't happen. I love it all in spite of the fact that I had to have my heart broken, I had to struggle, and I had to endure all the bad days to get here. I love it because of my past. I know the changes that I have been through firsthand. I know them all too well, and I know they have prepared me for this, for my happiness today. I wrote about a new kind of happiness in my last post and while I didn't write it because I couldn't actually bring myself to say it, I was thinking, "I miss my old happiness." And I do, don't get me wrong. But my new happiness, this happiness I feel today, is stronger, its genuine, its lasting. and that is something I definitely can't hate. 


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