Mental Self Check

I have a bad habit of bringing up the past. But I’m starting to realize that sometimes going back into the past can be healing. For me, I need to either be talking with my therapist or writing to gain benefit from the exercise.

Today, as I was practicing my harmonica, I began reflecting on everything that happened. All my mistakes, symptoms, injuries, and long, painful nights I didn’t think would end.

For most of my life, I decided I would not let myself feel sadness. That it was a feeling that had no use in my life. How can feeling an emotion that threatens to break me in two be a good thing? What is the purpose of all that pain?

I don’t claim to have the complete answer to those questions, but maybe, for myself at least, part of the picture is there. I think sadness can be healing. That when you feel it and don’t push it away, something happens. Something under the hood that I don’t really understand. Like a great tectonic shift deep within the earth, the gravity of the event is too titanic to understand.

And not only healing, but maybe sadness can honor those you love but now are gone. I’m not sure if there is a heaven or something after this life, but if there is, I would think the people who are gone would feel a type of respect when they see us mourn and hurt because they are no longer there. Maybe they see us in pain and then know that they were loved so deeply that even decades after their death, we still miss them.

One thing I do know for certain is that I must feel my sadness. Not pain for pain itself, but because if I don’t feel it, I will forever be stuck. Stuck with anger that unsuccessfully tries to bury the sadness. Stuck with carrying an anchor I was not meant to hold on to forever. And stuck in a perpetual cycle of running from my sadness only for it to clobber me in the end.

I don’t claim to have any answers on how people can heal from loss. For me, it’s not about being able to set it down and move on. It’s more about learning how to carry it so that it no longer breaks me.

I have found it is OK to be sad. That sadness is not something to run from. Because inside the sadness is the lesson on how to move on. That is what I have found. And even though it can be very painful, on the other side is something I have never had, a mind that can stop avoiding everything and embrace the parts of myself that I thought were weak and fragile. Maybe sadness is a key. One that can unlock a different life if only I have the courage to not push it away.