“POPULARITY IS WHEN PEOPLE ENJOY YOU; HAPPINESS IS WHEN YOU ENJOY YOU.”
If by this point in the book, you were able to take my advice and quit beating yourself up, congratulations! You can skip this small section. Here, we will look at ways to move on and begin to move forward. Right now, it’s just you and me, or rather, you and you. It is time to stop blaming yourself, stop beating yourself up, and begin to grow as an individual again.
At times, we may look at a loss or a bad past with rose-colored glasses. We see things better than they were. I want you to take a moment and think of a fresh mountain spring. Each time trust was broken, feelings were disregarded, or emotions were high, think of it as the water becoming more and more polluted. As that original mountain spring moves over the land, its waters grow murky as they pick up sediments and debris. This goes for any aspect of life: childhood trauma, relationships, and more. Simply filtering the dirty river water does not change the fact that the water had pollutants in it. This does not mean that the water is ruined permanently. However, order to be potable again, the water just needs to be filtered and given a little extra care and treatment.
Like the river, we all carry scars. Scars are not bad. Scars are proof that we survived, we lived, we adapted.
“IF YOU DON’T RECOGNIZE WHERE YOU BELONG, YOU CONFORM TO WHERE YOU ARE.”
Take a step back to face what went wrong in your life. Sometimes treating the past like you’re watching a movie helps. Grab some popcorn, and as the leading role, play out the trauma. What would you tell the actor you hired to play you? How would you help them through this stressful time to ensure they had the best future going forward? This would be a great time to open a fresh page in your journal. Write down the things you are proud of yourself for doing, the things you love about being who you are now after that loss, and what you love in a healthy life and routine. Finally, write out exactly what you expect in the next steps in your life. Keep in mind that it is good to have a plan, but we are never bound to it. You can stick to the path and still wander through undiscovered places along the way. Still, making a list of what you expect (not want) out of your life can be a powerful manifesto. It sets guidelines for how you expect to be treated and allows you to set healthy boundaries for yourself and your dreams. You can also write down the lessons you learned from the loss you experienced. These lessons help us establish healthy future relationships, goals, movement, and more. Again, be gentle with yourself as you do so. Be kind. Be authentic and open to whatever comes next. Remember, lessons make us stronger.
Perhaps this small exercise served to identify an area to place more of your focus. We might need to be more loving, more generous, more present, more trusting, and more loyal. That’s good advice, and we should take heed of it. Now that we’ve started to face it, turn to meet the rest of your life which is waiting for you to grow. Engage in it, in the present, with your head held high. Take a moral inventory of who you were, who you are, and who you might be. Do not let it overwhelm you. Keep close, always, your present, your truth.
