LETTING GO OF PAIN

 

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Everything we experience as we make our way through life shapes the person we are and will become in our future, and who we continue to become is ever changing.  Yet within these experiences there exists choices and I believe it is these choices which ultimately define not only the future us, but our eventual happiness.

The ultimate of these choices is letting go of pain. Many believe that once we forgive those that hurt us we are able to let go of the heartache they leave behind, heartache caused by being abandoned or betrayed.   

Feelings of abandonment and betrayal can be as a result of many different situations not just the common ones that come to mind - being left behind by a parent our spouse, or being cheated on by ones significant other.

Feelings of abandonment can be caused by being left out of moments of friendship; being excluded by friends because everyone else is paired up and you are not, for example, can also be called feeling of exclusion because your relationship status is not the same as those you are in friendships with. Feelings of betrayal can also be caused by a spouse not including you in either finances or financial decisions, or family matters on their side of the family or friends and co-workers snubbing your for reasons you have no control over or even their own feelings of unhappiness or inadequacy. 

The number of moments in daily life, either momentous or minor that can cause hurt are beyond our ability to count and we each have a different meaning for what constitutes momentous or minor events in our lives or experiences. 

Forgiving others who have caused us harm is one way of allowing us to let go of pain but not the only way. 

In my mind what causes us the greatest hurt is not that someone else broke our heart, or betrayed our trust but that we allowed it. That we did not see who and what they were doing before it was to late. We choose to believe in their love for us in the inherent goodness that we believe exists in people and in the universe. So we blame ourselves, maybe not consciously, yet the blame is still there. 

We cannot control what others do, or how they choose to treat us. We can also never know what people are or are not capable of all we can do is understand that we ourselves are human. As humans we make mistakes and that is okay. In those moments of impact, those moments of choice, we then need to choose to forgive ourselves for loving the wrong person, for trusting the wrong person and then we need to choose to learn from those mistakes. The next choice we need to make is choose to allow those moments of impact to change us. Once again there are choices to make. We can choose to be better, or we can choose to become like those who hurt us. The next choice is to once again allow ourselves to be open to other moments and other people.

We can choose to to give those who have caused us emotional pain a second chance or even numerous chances but when they continue to hurt us we cannot lay the blame at their feet. The blame for our continued pain can only our own fault. 

Life is all about choice. 

We choose to get out of bed every morning, we choose to take a shower, we choose to have a glass of wine or beer, we choose to work late and we choose to keep fighting for what is important to us and we can can also choose to let go of those who bring us nothing but pain. 

Nothing is ever truly out of our hands, there is always a choice, sometimes we might have to bring ourselves to choose between two evils. There is no such thing as an easy choice as every decision in life has its consequences, some foreseeable others not. 

All we can do is do what is the best we can and remember that we are only human 

About Writing

Why do I write this blog? Why did I start it to begin with?

I ask this on a regular basis especially now that I don’t have as much time to keep up with it. Some pieces take a day or two to write, the so called fluff/ advice pieces but the other writing the writing that I am actually interested in those take weeks sometimes a little over a month to complete because research takes time.

People think writing isn't a job, that it’s sit down and write and yes sometimes it is just that but other times it is laterally like giving birth. It’s painful, messy and exhausting but when it’s finally done it’s just the best feeling. It’s not always perfect, it takes time and patience to get it to be something that’s more than what it started out to be but it is also true that some stories have a life of their own. You start off thinking you are telling one type of story and when you look at it it’s turned into something else completely.

I think Stephen King’s number one asked question is where he gets his ideas and his simple answer is that that he sees to things and they come together in new and unusual ways and that to ask what if. This is something that I think people most people don’t expect. King does not only write horror but his horror novels are the most acclaimed and the man has written some bloody and disturbing scenes. Especially when his writing contains so many child characters fighting against evil it’s not an easy pill to swallow that his ideas come from such mundane things; the devil needs an heir, what would happen if he went to a small town to find that heir.

Writing is a labour, yes, but some stories want to be born, some stories the world needs, no matter the effort or the time it takes. People think King is a writer about horror and gore only but his stories have a deeper meaning than that. It’s about innocence and love, that innocence is important and powerful. Sometimes it the things we see cause us to lose that but sometimes it can be our greatest weapon but sometimes we have to give it up to overcome something.

Then there are books like You before me, that talks about accepting others choices about loving and giving it up or maybe loving someone enough to let them go. How do we accept and the choices other make, when they affect us deeply when we would rather have it be different. The truth is that we do this every day anyway, we have to accept the choices other make for themselves even when those choices do not affect them alone yet what would we do, how we would react if we had to be told about the decision before hand. Would we be able to accept it and still love them with no hate, would we be able to remember our time with them with fondness and affection? The saying, “It is better to have loved and lost, than to have never have loved” always bothered me but as you grow, grow in life experience and sometimes in age we begin to realise that this is true. Each time we love it’s different and it changes us somehow, a little every time. Of course it depends on the person because some people do not ways learn and become better when things in love go wrong they become worse, if they were hurt they take that hurt and feel the need to return it into the world. Then there are those that realise that they never want to hurt others the way they have been, if they are able to prevent it.

Then books like 13 Reasons Why, tell about a different type of pain, the pain of exclusion, the pain of being treated badly. When people who are your peers, people who are supposed to be just like you treat you not only as if you don’t matter or belong but verbally and physically abuse you it can be soul shattering. It is simply called bullying, the dictionary defines bullying as “use superior strength or influence to intimidate (someone), typically to force them to do something” and while this definition is on point the words could never convey just what that pain and humiliation is. Often when people describe what it felt like to be bullied not even they are able to carry across the feeling, that emotion that turmoil comes across in their voice, the expression the emotion that you see them go through as they talk about it.

Good writers are able to not only tell a story and set scenes but their job is to, in words alone, make you as the reader live the emotions and pain for a character. Yes, books that provide action and romantic angst are popular because they help escape from the hardships of life but other works are very necessary because the world we live in is changing every day. Life isn’t harder from generation to generation; things are just different as each new generation brings with it its own technology and a different means of communicating ideas and thoughts but with this there are also new means of hurting others.

Good writers are in a unique position to challenge sociality either directly or indirectly as they are the one able to shape the narrative. Good books, good writers, are not defined only by how entertaining they are but do they reflect something about the human condition, do they cause use to pause and consider if not our lives but the world around us.

Yes ago a read a book by Stephen Lawson “Chasm”, it stalks about an earth quake devastating a small town and inevitably the lives of its inhabitants, it is not the quake itself that necessarily changes the lives of those left alive, it is the beginning, but what happens after. A group of people find that they are only a handful left alive and each are very different from one another, no two back stories are anyway alike but not only do they have to learn to live their lives together under a single roof, because that is the only way they can be safe but eventually come to the realization that there is no escape from what now constitutes their existence. Besides the fact that each of the characters are damaged and no one can help them repair that damage but themselves, this is not what stood out to me about their fate. We eventually learn that this small group of people have been transported to a different reality, realm of existence or dimension if you will, where only parts of their town exists on small islands in a gaping chasm, shrouded by a mist that never lifts, a sun that never shines and a darkness that comes on suddenly and is infinite in its blackness but it was the creature that stalked the night; the creature that mentally tortured them before trying to kill them one by one.  The idea of a sentient black sludge that has the ability re-animate the dead is scary in itself but the fact that the sludge knows everything about them, every bad thought, every had thing that has happened to them and every single one of their fears is more terrifying. And all this sludge wants to do is hurt them, torment and torture them. Why? Not because it can but because its wants to. We find out later that this sludge has spent centuries in this void, growing, and that is everything evil in the world. And it literally is, the sludge is the physical embodiment of all the evil people our universe has done to one another; pain and hatred. This thing is a result of wars and everything that comes with it, famine, killing and tortue, every bad deed every day people do onto others and themselves, murder, physical abuse, self abuse, even small things that we believe as no impact to the world at large; arguments, unkind wards, nasty gossip even nad thoughts about others have call seemed into this realm to create this creature and it has been waiting, waiting for something or someone to be able to use this evil on. It has all these thoughts and feeling of hate with nothing to do with it until these people are stranded there with it.

And reading this book makes one wonder, what does happen to all that negative energy, all that anger and hate in the world? Where does it go? In physics and chemistry, the law of conservation of energy states that the total energy of an isolated system remains constant; it is said to be conserved over time. This law means that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it can only be transformed or transferred from one form to another. It has been proven that the energy the positive thoughts and energy as well as the negative has an effect on the things around us so maybe that effect is further reaching than we realise.

These are the things that good writers make you consider, and these deeper thoughts are often buried in the most unlikely stories. Being a writer is not a way of life, often it’s a job like any other but is a distinctive job, writers see things others don’t, or old everyday things in new ways. It is a good writers duty to make us see a different type of world than the one we live in.

What Makes You Stay?

Today I was listening to a song by Deana Carter “What Makes You Stay”, co-incidentally a friend then asked for advice about staying. I’m not qualified to give advice, hell most of the time the professionals we go to can only tell us what they feel the best course of action would be but they can never be 100% sure either since they only have your view of events. We all know our own experiences are not always exactly how things are, perception and emotion skews everything in the human mind.

Regardless, I began thinking “What Makes You Stay”, love is both horribly complicated and simple at the same time. Sometimes, we are left with the what-if feeling regardless of what action or choice we make when we come to a crossroads, other times months or even years down the line we know there was no better choice we could have made and we are even grateful for the choice we made.

Often asking the question why do we stay is as unanswerable as why do we love. Listing the attributes about these two feeling whether inter-related or not are just things about the person that reinforces the feelings that we already feel. For a parent to answer the question, why do we love our children is a much easier question to answer because this being is irrevocably a part of us, someone we helped create, mould, simply because there they were completely helpless and in need, because we see aspects of ourselves within them. These are things they learn from us, most are not born into these people, it is a life we are part of in ways we could never really be a part of in our partners.

The love we have for another grown person, that has nothing to do with us, who are entirely nothing like us is a love that grows for many reasons that we cannot explain. We often love people who don’t deserve the depth of feeling we feel for them, we love people who constantly hurt us and who we not only choose to forgive but accept whole-heartedly back into our lives. We also consciously hurt those we love, for whatever reason we have, often knowing what we do isn’t right but in those moments we either do it because we feel justified or because we feel we’ll make sure they never find out. Forgetting that simply by committing the act with the full knowledge of the pain the actions will cause places blame of the injustice squarely on our shoulders, regardless of whether they discover it or not, we are aware.

So the simple answer to why do we stay can then only be love. Love is what keeps us, regardless of our various other reasons, this is the true unexplainable root to every question, “ What Makes You Stay”, it’s not because of who they are, the way they treat you either occasionally or all the time, its not either because of the future person you “know” they will become. It has absolutely nothing to do with who the person really is, but everything to do with you. What you feel. The feeling in every moment whether it is bliss or pain is what truly keeps you rooted where you are. It is even that feeling of longing based in that love when you are not together that keeps you going back even when you know you should not.

When we realise that the answer to “What Makes You Stay”, is love, what then? Love can kill us in ways that is more of a “death” than actual death. When the body dies, it no longer feels but when the love within us slowly destroys fundamental parts of what we actually are,

that is a worse kind of death as we are reminded everyday what we once were. Yet love also makes us soar, opens something within us like nothing else in the known universe can. More songs, poetry and stories have been written about love gained and love lost than anything else. Yet nothing answers the question all of us has asked ourselves “What Makes Us Stay”, because if we were to put every wrong, hurtful thing someone has done to us on a scale on one side and on the other side we had to put love, what would the honest result in our minds be? That love for us would either balance out our scale or tip it in the favour of love. It takes a very strong person to realise that regardless of how much we love someone it does not justify the hurt.

So What Makes You Stay, the simple answer, your heart and what do we do about that? The only honest answer anyone can give...I don’t know. None of us do. The best thing we can do is our best, muddle though it and find out what makes us whole at the end of it all. Not for anyone but for us.