Rainbows and Darkness

When your memories hold you hostage, how do you begin to take your life back?

When you’re held prisoner to a constant movie reel of past pain and heartbreak, how do you break free? 

How do you emancipate yourself from your own mind? 

In my life, I’ve experienced joy and misery.  Happiness and depression.  Rainbows and darkness. 

It’s the dark, the bad memories that are the ones that repeat.  The ones where I can remember each detail in Technicolor, the sights, the smells.  All of it.  The good memories are more faded like an old photograph, the edges dog-eared and the images not as clear as they once were. 

I’m the one that bestows that power upon them.  I’m the one that went willingly, head hung low in defeat, into my cell of sadness inside my own mind.  I condemned myself to this life, to putting my focus on the negative.

I’ve spent a lifetime drowning in the awful. 

It’s high time I started to kick to the surface. 

But how?  How do we begin to wrest ourselves from the self latched chains of our memories, our pasts?  What defining event will open the door?

What beautiful things have happened to me that I’ve shoved to the recesses of my mind and forgotten and replaced with something shameful, embarrassing, hurtful or sad?  What have I missed out on because of my frightening ability to see only the terrible?  How many smiles, hugs, encouraging words, beautiful scenes?  How many compliments?  How many breathtaking sunsets?  How many moments of just love, be it friend, family, significant other? 

How many lost memories are running adrift in my mind because I’ve refused to see them?

Is setting yourself free as simple as telling yourself that’s what you’re going to do?  Resolving to no longer give it the power it held before?  Can it be that easy? 

I suppose that it can’t hurt to try.  It can’t hurt any more than I’ve already hurt myself. 

So then today, now, right this minute, with fear and hope in my heart, I vow to stop it.  I’m taking away the power.  I’m taking away the power I’ve given to the bad memories, to the darkness, to the fear, to the hopelessness, to the anger, to the people who’ve hurt me, to the people who enjoyed my suffering. 

I’m done letting memories, emotions, and people control my life, my mind.  It’s done. 

I’m taking back my life.

Too long I’ve spent wishing to be happy, to be free. 

Today, I’m moving in a different direction.  I’m shedding those chains; I’m losing my prisoner number. 

I want to know joy.  Know it fully.  Know it like we have a secret handshake. 

Fear and hate and anger can go right back to the hell that spawned them all.  I’m done with you. 

I want my goddamn life back.

And it starts today.