Healing

Was supposed to be doing some work tonight but stumbled upon a photo that I shouldn't have seen. 

First, it made me feel indifferent. Then my mind started playing tricks with me. It told me I should feel something. It told me I should judge and I should analyze. What is this? A test of my healing? 

And that sent me into the depths of my wounds. No, I think the better word today is, my scars. No longer open wounds. No longer wounds that were left there to bleed for years, wounds that used to be visited from time to time to add salty tears to and remind myself each time how painful they are. 

This time, things are different. They are now scars. Healed wounds. Healed. Not perfectly, but they are no longer openly bleeding. The mark will always be there, and the tears might wash over them at times, but now, they no longer sting. Because they are no longer bleeding wounds. They are just memories. They are visible for the mind to revisit, but they hold no pain. 

Surely there are some wounds that were not mended perfectly, surely for those they might still sting, but now we know how to mend them. No, actually, we now know that they CAN be mended. They don't need to bleed for us to be a person with a past. Those wounds no longer need to hold the emotions that once were. 

Healing is a long journey, it truly is. But the beauty is it gets easier and easier. Every step forward is a step further away from what used to tether you to the past. By the time you realize and look back, that thing that once bothered you is now so so far away that you can't even really "see" it anymore. You know it's there, but it's so blurry you forgot how it felt like. And now the future is nearer than the past. 

This journey of healing and self discovery has led me to learn who I am. And to learn to teach myself things that everyone else is too broken to learn. We can have a million people around us guiding us but at the end of the day, ultimately it is ourselves that need to steer the ship. And this I will do. I will steer this ship to complete healing. 

I send myself love and compassion tonight because from the thousand of steps I have climbed up in this journey, tonight I have stumbled back down a few. But that's ok, right now I am sitting on that step that I stumbled to and I am sending my heart love and the energy to climb back up further again. Because I have climbed a thousand steps, what's does a few steps back do to my journey? Nothing. Because my intention is going forward. And as long as my mind says forward, no matter how many steps I fall back on, I will still always only continue forward.