Once upon a time, I was someone different.
I was younger. I was full of ideals about the world and everyone in it.
I was married to someone who didn’t fulfill those ideals. He didn’t even try. As a matter of fact, he turned into the exact opposite of the ideals I held about people and how they are supposed to treat other people.
I was naïve. I can’t stress enough just exactly how naïve I was.
I’m a little more jaded now. Time has put a clearer focus on my past. It’s given me the distance to let go of a lot of the things I wasn’t willing to stop giving myself hell over at the end of it all. It’s allowed me to step back, take a breath, and forgive myself for the things I couldn’t see coming no matter how large they loomed on the horizon.
Now I’m at a different place in my life. I am not as naïve as I was back then. My personality is changed. My life is changed. I sit in a better place than I did only a few years ago. Heck, I sit in a better place than I was as short as a month ago.
I think people sometimes forget that everyone has a past and that they lived different lives before they came to rest where they are at this moment in time.
We almost all have been in some form of love in our pasts. We have almost all faced heartbreak at some point in our past. We all have baggage that carries in our minds and our hearts.
It was recently pointed out to me that I have some pieces of my past, that in my hurry to escape it, I had forgotten to rid myself of. A few old letters, old pictures, mementos of a life lived before the life I currently lead now.
These things lie in boxes and files like bombs of the past that are waiting to pierce my brain like tiny pieces of shrapnel, leaving me scarred and slightly broken all over again.
I learned that these things carry an even heavier blast to The Electrician because they are a reminder that I was once a different person with a complicated past before I met him. He doesn’t like these bomb blasts any more than I do.
So for now I ask for patience from him as I sort through my belongings for the first time since I tossed things in boxes in order to escape a painful and volatile situation. My life was one big scary, busy, frustrating, anxious mess before he found me. I am just now finding a place where I can breathe, stop, and rid myself of the last lingering detritus of the person I once was.
It’s time to empty the trash.
