There’s a point in your healing journey when it comes time to actually close a door and move on. This is after you’ve already faced your fears, faced your traumas and hardships, and worked through your emotions with all of it. This comes right at the end when it’s time to start a new phase. It’s time to move on from the past and toward a new future you are building with each step forward.
When overcoming life’s hardships and closing a cycle, leaving the past in the past and moving forward is sound advice but it also seems so insurmountable. What an easy thing to say, and yet to actually move forward without toting wounded baggage around feels nearly impossible. How can I just leave this thing that has so upended my life? How can I just leave this thing that hurt me, traumatized me, mistreated me? How can I walk away from it as if it was nothing when to me it changed everything?
We develop this almost romanticized notion that somehow our strength comes from carrying that THING with us as some kind of warning to ourselves or as some kind of badge of honor that we can point at and declare, “look what I overcame.” To leave it in the past feels almost like a slight to all your effort to survive and overcome. If you don’t have this THING to pull out and show off, how can you prove your strength? How can you prove your wisdom? How can you validate your pain and thus your healing?
The difficult truth is, carrying that painful memory, event, trauma, burden, hardship around doesn’t make you stronger, it just prolongs the state of defensiveness.
Your strength does come from overcoming the THING, but not from carrying it around. The wisdom you gained from it is integrated into you, you don’t need to constantly look at the THING to remember what you learned. Your pain is valid, and your healing journey is, too, you don’t need a strange trauma trophy to prove it. You don’t need to prove anything to anyone—especially not to yourself.
It’s okay to move forward, and not take it with you.
It’s okay that one day, you will wake up and it won’t be the first thing on your mind.
It’s okay that one day you will wake up and not think of it ever again.
It’s okay to forget.
You are not less, your achievements are not less, your strength is not weakened, and your complexity as an individual is not reduced if you take the THING from off your back, set it down, and walk away for good.
It’s okay to move on.
It’s okay to not look back.
It’s okay to be healed.
It’s okay to be happy.
It’s okay to forget.
We are the sum of our experiences; all events, moments and choices in our lives add up to create who we are. We don’t need to keep every single receipt. It served its purpose and was added to our total. It helped make us who we are.
Who we are in each moment does not need to be proved by the hardships of our past, only by the total of our character in the present.
If you’ve ever gone to set the THING down and a nagging voice in your head stopped you and said, “but what if I need this later?” I’m here to tell you, you won’t.
You don’t need to pull it out to give advice. You don’t need to carry it around to help others. You don’t need it to remind yourself of what you’ve been through and what you’ve learned. You don’t need it at all for anything. It was already added to your total, and you will not be audited. You can do all those things based on your sum, for your wholeness is your truth.
It’s okay to forget and move on.
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