Good Girl Chronicles: Does the Past Ever Stay the Past?

2016

This is My War: The Journey to Peace with Your Past

Like scabs that never completely heal. Like ghosts that don’t stay buried.

My past haunts me.

Do you know how it feels to be a war with yourself? Someone who feels so distant but still such part of you. It’s an invisible forms of self-harm. It feels like a tearing, and a ripping of your inner self. Every time you wish you were another you, it feels like daggers to the heart of the person you are now.

I am discovering a large part of finding peace with your past is to call a cease fire between the person you were and the person you are becoming. Your two selves walk over the dead parts of your lives, and broken dreams to a place only you two really know. The place in your heart where each of you owns a space.

And when you get there… here’s what you must do.

Stare at your past. Honor it. Thank it for getting you to this point. Thank the past for teaching you, molding you, shaping you. Thank the past for making you who you are.

I could not have a heart for the broken hearted if my heart wasn’t first broken first. I would not know fullness until I knew hunger. I could not be a star if I never shot for the moon. I needed those cold, lonely nights to appreciate real warm embraces. II needed certain people to walk away so I could learn to walk alone. I needed the failures to fight for my own success. I had to lose it all to find what really mattered.

My past is littered with pain, abandonment, rejection, wrong choices, and missteps. But I know now you do not have to carry your past to honor.

There will be moments when you mourn the past. You will ache for the way he loved you. You will agonize over the money that clothed you. You will long for the friends that no longer call. This is grief, and grieving. There is no timeline on it. It will come in waves, and sometimes not at all.

You will say to your past, "I love you for making me who I am, but it is time for me move on."

Your past will bolster your resolve to move. It will remind you how you survived the slammed doors, the unanswered calls, the cold nights on a church sanctuary praying for a place you could call home. Your past will call out that you are a SURVIVOR, a conqueror. On the hardest parts of the journey your past will remind you have the strength to keep going.

When you make peace with your past you can honor it, step off the battlefield, and start writing a new story.

Every day I am doing just that. Slowly, walking further away from the with my past. Moving closer to a place I get to create.

A future that is mine.

The becoming Lauren is bold, courageous, kind, and ever evolving. The becoming Lauren is accepting that the past is part of me, but not who I am anymore.