Starting Over From The Fragments Of Pain

Through all the times I’ve started over in my life, I would romanticize each new beginning. And when it didn’t fit my utopian beliefs of what quintessential should be, it distorted the lens through which I saw my fresh start. It somehow became tainted, like I had to erase the slate again, do a deep clean, and only then, I could try again.

If maybe I could somehow erase every mistake, wipe my memory, “forgive” the people that harmed me, and turn a blind eye on the very things that shaped me into myself- I wouldn’t be the person I was so ashamed of being.

And so, each fresh start was built on burial grounds, not fresh soil.

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With each contamination of my newly acquired life, I couldn’t figure out why building it on a burial ground didn’t work. It’s what we’ve been conditioned to do, so it should be effective.

But burying skeletons doesn’t make them disintegrate. They’re still exposed in the dirt they’re buried in. It’s only a matter of time until the maggots come for them.

Fresh starts aren’t wrapped neatly in a pretty package- they’re a culmination of the bridges we torched, the holes in our heart, the tears we’ve shed, the years we wish we never wasted, the what-ifs that plague our mind. Fresh starts are built from the burial grounds we refuse to keep buried.

Starting over isn’t a clean slate, it’s messy and chaotic. We have to purge the people, places, and even things that destroy our peace while learning to be someone we’ve never met.

We don’t walk away from those people, places and things because we want to, we walk away from them because the pain of staying is greater than the pain of leaving. We learned the harsh reality too many times that the only way change will happen is for us to change.

We have to cry the tears, we have to let our heart bleed, and we need to feel the things we wish didn’t make us, us.

That slate is fractured and fragmented with our beliefs, the harbored anger and grief, the memories that are too raw to look at. Those fragments carry the parts of ourselves we don’t know how to love. Those fragments also carry the pieces of ourselves we wish someone can hold.

How we fill those gaps is how we create a life we’re proud to call ours, a life that’s lived on our own terms, not anyone else’s- not even the silent whispers that tell us we aren’t good enough.

And so, we can fill those gaps with the things we want to carry with us, the memories we cherish, and the people we call home. Or we can leave those holes for the things we don’t want in our new journey, to let them fall into the dark abyss.

Or we can even have both. The beauty isn’t that we get a new start, the beauty is that we get to choose how we start over.

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