Confession Time

Friends, it’s time for a confession. Only a few of you will know what I’m referring to in this post so I guess this is really for you, and I hope I don't come across as attacking or ungrateful for your attempts to try and help me. I’m hoping that writing it will somehow be therapeutic or cathartic for me and help me piece things together. Apologies in advance for my jumbled and repetitive thoughts.

I try to avoid this song like the plague, but tonight I caved in for just a little bit. Please take a listen, it's beautiful!

It’s been a hard week. Work was long and stressful and more than ever before I just feel like a really inadequate nurse.

More than that I have some emotional wounds that still somehow cannot manage to produce scar tissue even after a year of time. Most times I can't believe it's been a year, last October doesn't seem like it's 12 months into my past. 

I cried and cried tonight. I don’t know why I can still burst into tears over my poor heart. It’s probably because I made the mistake of watching part of “P.S. I Love You” tonight…the theme song (posted above) has been my “song” for a special time in my life that I know I need to lock in the cupboard and never bring back out.

But for some reason I can’t let go. I have tried and tried. Some tell me to just get over it and I’m trying, but it’s not so easy. Perhaps if I didn’t talk about it or think about it so much it would happen, but that’s just it. I can’t get it out of my head. It’s everywhere. In my friends, my favorite star constellations, reading my books, enjoying a day at the park, my piano music, my favorite cookie recipe, every road trip with scenic and historical byways, every documentary, my scriptures, my wool socks, even my detested Metformin…every piece of me. No part of me or my life is untouched. It doesn’t matter what job I have or what I’m doing or who my friends are. I can’t escape. I could drive for five hours somewhere to get away from my memories, then step outside and see Polaris in the sky and be stuck all over again in a brand new place.

But hurting reminds me what it feels like to be alive. And perhaps that’s some cynical masochist behavior coming out in me, but I crave the memory that taught me what it feels like to really be alive on this Earth. And as much as I try and explain that to my closest friends I don’t know if they will be able to really comprehend and appreciate the magnitude of my experience, even if they do try.

Because something like that is something that you don’t just “move on” from. You can’t. I used to believe I could, but the more I try the more I have failed.

I have been encouraged to continue to just try and let it go, move on, try new things and places in my life. And I have been trying new things. I was promised that it would be hard, but that it’s the right decision and I would feel better. I’m still waiting to feel better, because trying to forget the beauty that was brought into my life and introduced a new way of living is perhaps one of the most miserable things I have felt in my entire life…ten months and counting. Because there is still beauty in that pain, more beauty and appreciation than there is without it.

And perhaps that is one of the reasons I can’t let it go.

To that, some might advise me that it’s time to find beauty in new things. And that might be true.  But I would also suggest that they don’t really understand.

It’s not the things I enjoy or find beauty in that conjures painful memories. It’s the beauty itself, regardless of the medium. And I refuse to strip my life of that.

I will be okay, and I know that. I am okay, even though I’m going through an extraordinary tough patch right now.

And perhaps someday I will be able to appreciate the beauty and no longer feel pain from those memories. I believe that someday that will happen.

I am also saying that I refuse to be in a situation like that ever again because I want this memory untarnished in its full beauty. And if that means that I choose to never fall in love again, so be it. Old love never can or will be revisited by me, but new love is not something I am interested in.

Maybe I seem a little dramatic. But I just want you to know that I am so grateful for my experiences. Please don’t ask me to move past them or abandon them. And thank you for being there for me when I have needed it the most.