Dealing with the past and coping with my memories was a hard step to take. I felt, at first, that the past controlled who I was. It was safe because it was known. That was the way the world was. The past was dominating me, my feelings and my thoughts.
It took time to realise that that was the case only because I was holding on to it and because I was hiding in it.
It was the present that had become unreal and the answer, for me, has been the acceptance of the memories, of what had happened.
Wishing things were different, remembering events, big and small, real or imagined, and dwelling on them, changes nothing but perpetuates much.
I tried to let the past go.
I tried to shut it out.
Hiding it, rejecting it, pretending it didn’t exist, could never work, for it left it intact.
It was still there, waiting, looming, forever over the shoulder, behind the back, round the next corner. It still had its power of control.
It still affected everything I did, everything I felt, everything I hoped for, everything I planned.
When I was hiding from it, shutting it away, denying it, I was reacting to it.
By releasing it, by setting it free, I have broken my connection with it.
While still being able to see it and to recognise what it is, I am no longer tied to it, bound up in it, controlled by it.
Once I could accept the past, its effects could be challenged.
Then I could stop, or at least control, my reaction to it and, by regaining the initiative, choose  my own direction.
Distressing memories need to be accepted for what they are.
We cannot hide them, deny them, or pretend that they are something else.
In accepting that the past is what happened we can stop trying to rationalise it. Then we take away memory’s power to affect us, to make us react.
Once we no longer respond to it we can set it free.
Once it is free we have broken the connection and we can coexist. We are no longer denying it but can acknowledge that it is there only as a reference point. However we need to keep our connections to other memories for we want to react to them.
They give colour and texture to the picture that is our life story

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The past defines
not who we are
but how we got here

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It is a record
not of where we are
but of circumstances
that have affected
our passage here

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Memory is what we know
The story of our past
We must forgive to let it go
Or all that hurt will last

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Memory is frailty
Questions unanswered
Regrets unresolved
Desires unfulfilled
Until we set it free

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Tomorrow is an unwritten page…….