"The 7 rules of Life" mini-series : "Make peace with your past so that it won’t screw up your present"

Introducing the first part of "The 7 rules of Life" mini-series, I wanted to talk about something some of us have experienced more or less at different levels depending on our ability to recover from situations that happen in our lives and affect us whether we are aware of it or not. So today, let's talk about being stuck in the past, hoping that my experience will help you let go and move on. Now let's be honest here: it is really easy to stay stuck in your past and quite frankly for being there, it is one reason why I would NEVER judge people having a hard time letting go of things. Letting go/ making peace with your past is so easy to say but it is really a hard thing to do and anybody who has been there once in life can attest it. I can attest it. So many things can hold you in the past, things you might or might not be aware of. Things you thought you let go of but truly you buried in and repressed until the day something triggered those repressed feelings or reopened that ugly wound you thought you were done dealing with.

It can be an ugly breakup, the loss of someone dear to you, someone who did you so wrong and hurt you so bad that you can’t seem to get over it. A mistake you made which has been haunting you ever since. Whatever it is that is holding you in your past, you have to go back to it and deal with it. You have to find the root of the problem and solve it. Finding a way around will only delay the onset of the symptoms for a few days, a few months or maybe a fear years? But sooner or later it is going to come back around and kick you in the behind. I have myself been through a lot of very emotional things which I thought repressing was the answer to. But then every time I thought I was fine, something would come along and just hit on that very one thing I was trying to repress and cheat myself into think I was over with. It took me a while to understand the reason why this would constantly happen. Why it hurt so much but most importantly why it always seemed to bring me back to one specific thing deep down I knew I was not over with. And then I understood that maybe life was giving me an opportunity to go to the root of an issue I had that I never really dealt with.

Maybe life was giving me an opportunity to face those emotions I only knew how to respond to by shutting down and pretending I was okay. It was time for me to open up, talk about those issues, let out all those repressed feelings of anger, sadness and frustration. I had reached a critical point where I had no other choice but to talk about the way I felt and address those issues in order to  be able to move forward. It was the time I finally had the opportunity to forgive myself for the mistakes  I made and understand that it was my past. Not my present, not my future, just my past. I had the opportunity to hold onto the lessons and let go of the pain and the mistake in order to better myself. Once I finally understood this and I starting fixing what was broken by treating not the symptoms but the root of the disease, it finally felt like I was ready to move on. I was finally ready to definitely and permanently close some doors of my past I was always so prompt to reopen and burn some bridges that I knew would take me down roads I never wanted to take again. It wasn’t easy but I wanted to do it. I was tired of my past screwing up my present. I was done carrying over the broken pieces of me from my past into each new day I was offered and that I was supposed to use to build a better, happier and stronger me. Though making peace with my past is a daily effort and a constant work in progress, ever since I started doing it I feel more at peace with myself now than I ever felt.

I have learned two very important lessons from that journey. The first one is that I had the wrong notion of being strong: I thought it was not showing the world how you feel but I discovered that being strong is about showing the world that you have struggles too. You cry too. Your life is not perfect but you deal with it. You fall but you don’t stay on the ground: you stand up and you keep walking to reach that destination you are going to. The other and the most important lesson is that my past is just a story and coming to the full realization of this definitely set me free. I realized that the situations I went through, the mistakes I made were meant for me to learn a lesson and LET IT GO of the pain/ the situation.

It will not be easy to make peace with your past and letting go of all these things that are holding you back, if you are ready to move on to live a better, happier life and build a better future it will be worth all the troubles and the hardship it comes with. And if after this you are still not convinced and you are still stuck, just remember that you can't grow unless you let go.