Jagged Little Pill

Mind Tricks

I often console myself with the idea that I raised my children to be independent and self-sufficient enough to not need me. It's a mind trick. I also tell myself that if they are happier without me, then I must rejoice in the fact that they're happy. After all, we want our children to be happy, right? 

Another mind trick. I even sometimes say out loud that my relationship with them is better than it's ever been after eight years of estrangement. Zero conflict and drama in my life.

None of these tricks address my emotions at all, but they do help. It took time for the emotions of the losses to catch up and resolve.

Jagged Little Pill

Actually, I'm mostly okay having worked through the history and seeing it for what it is, owning what's mine and discarding the rest. As Alanis Morrisette so beautifully sang so long ago, "you live, you learn."

As I now see it, there's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then. Nothing, even the dangling carrot of reconciliation, could tempt me. That old life was filled with high cortisol and limerence. I had been trained in my upbringing to be supportive and flexible and to subjugate my needs, making me a prime candidate to live in a dreamy state of what could have been but never was, bending and twisting myself to conform.

The truth is I don't know who they are now. And, they have never truly known who I am.

Time changes all things, right?

Kierkegard said, life must be lived forward but can only be understood backward. But there is danger lingering too long in the past, of becoming stuck. Been there done that - was stuck for a decade. It's not a place I want to go back to.

The future is stronger than our past. It's our legacy. I choose daily to act in the knowledge of truth and stopped living under the accusation of a lies eight years ago.

Eight years ago, I chose to embrace life, even when I was scared of it, because you can't follow your dreams standing still.

#jaggedlittlepill You Learn

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