The Echoes Of Yesterday

I can still hear the echoes of those voices in my head- “Family is everything, are you sure you’re not imagining things? Blood is thicker than water.”

Family is the source of our trauma if we were raised in toxic and dysfunctional homes. If I imagined my trauma, then I also overestimated their emotional intelligence. Blood from the covenant is thicker than water from the womb.

When I chose solitude and isolation to heal the fragments I thought made me broken, it was weaponized against me like I was an aberration. I would be met with pitying looks, underhanded insults, and sometimes, even flat out disrespect because I was choosing quiet over the approval of people I never even liked or respected.

The irony is that when you willingly lay on the train tracks, they don’t like how you’re laying. And when you decide you’re no longer willing to be the eager accomplice in your own debauchery, you’re somehow the abuser.

It’s like no matter how much time passes, the past lingers in ways to show me it’s still a part of my story. And I can choose to write a new one or I can choose to live and breathe by it.

More so lately, maybe because I’m seeing the people from my past as reflections of who they’ve shown me to be, and no longer the distortions of who I wish they were.

We don’t get a say in the hand we’re dealt, but we can choose how we play the hand we’ve been dealt.

And no, our emotions are a little more complicated than a card game. But, as long as we consciously choose to want better for ourselves, we’ll eventually arrive at better for ourselves.

It isn’t about not caring what people think about us, because we’re biologically wired for human connection, so some part of us will always care. It’s about valuing our opinion of ourselves more than we value what others think about us. It’s about respecting ourselves more than we respect the people we would never want to trade places with. And it’s about trusting ourselves more than the external voices that diminish our worth.

This doesn’t happen in the moments when we’re happy and things are working in our favor. It happens in the moments when we feel like the Universe is out to get us, it happens in the moments we don’t want to get out of bed, it happens in the moments we don’t know how to move forward. It happens in the moments the past begs for one more chance, and we choose the pain of leaving over the suffering of staying.

Better isn’t built from good. Better is built from the ashes of who we once were.

So, let the fire from those ashes create the life you secretly wish you have. Let the ashes of who you once were carry you into the person you daydream about becoming. And let the echoes of yesterday be just that- echoes.

I’ll see you soon…in the meantime, love yourself so much that even a Hallmark Christmas movie would be jealous.