Do We Really Have To Visit Old Wounds

You recognize that familiar, dull feeling in your gut — as though something is wrong, though you can’t quite pinpoint what. Something is off- you’re not connected to yourself, to the world…

You go through life stymied by this ache. It crescendos and crashes. You get distracted by the news or your job or Twitter, or something that temporarily scares you a little bit more.

It goes on, until one day, you realize you’re being levied, haunted, by a pain you can’t quite decipher. Slowly, it wears you down. It’s harder to get up. It’s harder to go out. It’s easier to drink and then drink some more. Or maybe eat, or drink or shop. Everyone has a different vice.

The thing about life is that our emotional experiences, if we don’t finish them, stay with us. They stay with us like old clothes we never get around to packing up and putting out at the curb.

Haunting us, numbing us, making us reach for wine or shopping or whatever vice and we can’t figure out exactly why…

Those subtle feelings are incomplete emotions, unresolved problems. They are signals, yes, but signals to the spaces in which you are not yet free.

When you’re ready to heal, you will need to revisit these old wounds. Have them show you their origins. You will see moments you forgot about, feelings you forgot you ever felt. You will see the past come up in blinks and vignettes.

Slowly, over time, you will awaken to what is really wrong, which is the piece of you that had to break off to build a wall because behind it was a wound you did not yet know how to heal.

In the healing process, you don’t just learn how to go back and fix what you didn’t finish. You also learn how to press forward, how to live more intently and presently, how to process your experiences in real-time.

The more you do this, the more you will awaken and begin to show up for life. You start speaking again, you start feeling again, you start being again. You can dance when the music plays, cry when you’re sad, take a risk though it’s scary.

When you feel strong enough to look at what’s wrong, you begin to unearth your soul. It was always there, you were never lost. It was just buried under years and layers of identities and styles and beliefs and ideas that had adhered themselves to you like a shield.

You were never lost. You were only hidden. And all the time you spent feeling so uncomfortable was just your deepest self trying to speak to you, trying to remind you of its presence.

It was only the core of you saying: Keep going, there is more to life than this.

B 🤍