Baggage Carrier

I have in later years of life discovered the power to journal, the power to free myself by writing my story! Life scars you, you end up carrying the scars with you through many of your days.

Most of us can relate on some level to that feeling, we all have a story of being hurt. Though some of us have endured more serious situations, you really can’t quantify or compare people’s emotional pain.

Like everyone, I've been hurt, in both profound and trivial ways, the journey I share was by far the most traumatic.

What hurts?

For me at times my world became the adversary; my pain re-shaped my world. It’s not always easy to identify and understand what’s hurting you; it became difficult to separate and identify what was hurting. I was carrying all this baggage, I was carrying anger, carrying un-forgiveness, carrying pain, carrying shame! This baggage was not mine to carry. Because the load was heavy the road was difficult to walk.

I needed to unpick and begin to re-define my pain.

There’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to communicate how you feel to the person who hurt you; and if you can, there’s no guarantee they’ll respond how you want them to. Mine didn’t; for years we lived as if it never happened. His life appeared to me to flourish whilst mine was dying inside.

Pain will keep you trapped in the past reliving an old record.  At times the thought of freeing myself through forgiveness felt as if it was a betrayal to my dad’s memory. 

I have learnt however that reliving the past is detrimental to your present, reliving the past can be addictive. It gives you the opportunity to do it again and respond differently—to fight back instead of submitting, to speak your mind instead of silencing yourself. It also allows you to possibly understand better. What happened? What should you have done?

In other words, it allows you to torture yourself. Regardless of what you should have done, you can’t do it now.  I learnt to fight the urge to relive the pain; I couldn't go back and find happiness there. I told myself to change the story I was telling myself. 

No amount of reassurance would change what happened. I couldn't find happiness whilst holding onto a painful story. I went past what I will never get over. I will never get over how my father died, it's not something you can. You can however get past the pain of 'what if's and ‘how could they?'. You move on from the pain cycle.

Forgive and fly

I wasn't a victim, so I stopped playing the blame/victim game; it only holds you back. You can’t feel good about yourself if you use the present moment to feel bad about another person’s past actions.

The only way to experience happiness is to take responsibility for creating it. You’re not responsible for what happened to you in the past but you're responsible for your attitude now. Why let someone who hurt you in the past have power over your present?  
You can have a sad story in your past without building your present around it. 

Reconnect with who you were before the pain.

It’s not easy to release a pain identity, particularly if you've carried it around for a long time. It may help to remember who you were before that experience—or to consider who you might have become if it hadn't happened. You can still be that person, someone who doesn't feel bitter or angry frequently.

Someone once asked if forgiving my cousin was letting him off the hook?  To this I reply of course I am,  because by letting him off my hook I give room for God to deal with HIS hook, I like the sound of those odds better.