No matter how long ago something bad happened, no matter how well it's been 'dealt with', no matter how much we want to believe we've 'moved on' or 'gotten past it' or 'forgotten all about it' - there are going to be times when we'll be having an off day without any sort of good reason we can pin down.
As the intervening years fly past, more recent events of that particular date tend to take precedence, and that's a good thing.
Even so, for some unfathomable reason there are times when certain dates or times of year pop up with attached baggage. We don't want to acknowledge it, we try to ignore it, and many times the moment slips away with only a vague uneasiness or a slight headache that soon fades and we think nothing of it.
Once in a while, however, a memory surfaces on a certain date, or under certain conditions, that isn't merely uneasiness or slight discomfort. Decades after the fact, the memory of a bad thing can and will fling itself into a person's consciousness and knock them to their knees. The processes of 'getting over it', of 'dealing with it', of 'forgetting about it' are never as effective or as complete as we would like to believe.
So what are we supposed to do when it's many long years later and we believe we're safely 'past all that' we're suddenly fighting to maintain composure in the midst of being assaulted by a bad memory?
Fight the fight, maintain, and then when we're in our safety zone and not at risk of losing it in public, go with it. Let those memories have their say for a little while. Once they have your permission to show their faces, listen to them and watch them unfold for a little while.
Then sneer at them. Tell them to sit down and shut up. Laugh at them. Remind them, and yourself, that they are only present with YOUR permission. Revoke the permission.
The thing is that they no longer have any power over us. WE are back on our own two feet. WE are in the driver's seat now. WE can sneer and laugh and tell them to sit down and shut up. WE can use them as reminders of how much we have to celebrate.
That's the bottom line here.
Celebrating ourselves as we now are and getting on with it.
The triggers might still be clicking away to beat the band, but we've taken the ammunition out of the weapon. So let them click, sez I. Celebrate them! They're reminders of our strength, our tenacity, our love of living. They didn't kill us when they had live ammunition backing them, so to speak; what on earth do they think they're going to accomplish now that they're nothing more than little clicks?
They can take their ugly little clicking selves back to the dark corners of our gardens where they belong and hide their ugly little faces from the sunlight of our now lives, and we'll watch them scuttle off with their ugly little tails between their ugly little legs. Some things, sad but true, do NOT deserve our attention. Not once they've been shown up for what they really are, which are nothing more than annoyingly ugly little clicks.
Now there's a thought, huh?
If/when one of those annoyingly ugly little clicks dares to peep its annoyingly ugly little face out of its corner, use it as a reason to celebrate our lives and do something special and beautiful. Because we still HAVE our lives, and we CAN do something special and beautiful!
No comments:
Post a Comment