Or get STUCK in it.
YOU have to move through shit before you can move past it.
It’s in those quiet moments, when you are finally alone, that stuff often hits you. Maybe you’re driving along and that song comes on, bringing with it a flood of painful memories. Or suddenly your house is empty and the silence overpowers you, forcing you to feel whatever you have been distracting yourself from.
And you realise that you haven’t actually dealt with something. Or you haven’t finished processing it. Or you have been avoiding it. It ripples through your body and you have to stop in your tracks, because the force is enough to knock you over if you’re not careful.
And maybe you feel like you should have moved past this already (me). You feel guilty that something is still making you upset. You get annoyed at yourself that you’re still hurting. FUCK. You say to yourself. I shouldn’t be feeling this. Not now, not still.
It’s like we put a time limit on our feelings.
So does society. Like, you’re not over that yet? Get out there and forget about it! Get under someone to get over someone (hang on, I think that does work momentarily). Make yourself busy so you don’t think about it. Move on.
Move on. And you go, move on? Great okay, let’s keep going forward and just leave that dragging there behind you.
Because you can move on, for sure. But that shit’s still going to be there hon.
I had romantic connection with someone earlier this year. It was all going along nicely. We were getting along really well, and there was talk about future plans, and it was all happy days. When I went overseas for a couple of weeks, things started getting weird. Upon my arrival back home, the weirdness continued until it came out that this person had had a surprise run-in with their ex. They couldn’t commit to me because they had still not worked through this relationship ending, which had been twelve months prior.
No deal? No moving on.
I mean, I understood it, we've all been there.
I thought I was totally okay after the little bump in the road with this person. I thought I had felt the things and done the things and said the things that would allow me to move on with grace and ease.
Nah. Sorry. Not yet.
It hit me a couple of weeks back. I got home, I closed my door, I lay on my bed and cried. I cried for myself. I cried because I had tried and I had been vulnerable and I had thought there would be a different outcome. I cried because actually, yes I was hurt and that’s okay. And then. I started writing this. I wrote an Instagram post about it.
I expressed the feelings. I acknowledged the feelings. I processed the feelings. And then I let them all go.
I set them FREE.
And now I have to add a story about a beautiful moment of watching this in action, out in the real world...
If you tuned in to my Instagram Live on the weekend, you will know that I experienced a moment (or several) of pure human realness.
Divine timing brought me into a little vegetarian fast food joint in the middle of Sydney at midnight at the exact time my beautiful friend Nathan also arrived. We exclaimed at the craziness of the odds of seeing each other and chatted about our nights, both volunteering at Mardi Gras.
Whilst standing like sardines waiting for our food, a dude asked Nathan what are five things that make him happy? He explained that him and his friend had spent the last few hours surveying various members of the public and asking them for their answers.
At first I thought the dude was maybe mucking around, drunk and his friend was going to pipe up with some silly response. But boy was I wrong.
As Nathan divulged his eloquent, heartfelt answers, and we discussed life and happiness and human-ness, the dude’s friend started crying. Now I mean crying, sobbing.
The dude who asked the question about happiness explained that his friend was having a hard time finding happiness in his life, hence why they were asking people. A friend had recently committed suicide and the crying dude was having a hard time dealing with it.
Nathan imparted some spot on words of wisdom, as he does, and we all talked about how we had all been there and how brave he was (a man, crying in a public place, so beautiful).
I was honestly speechless.
And then I said.
You have to go through what you are going through now to find happiness. This is where it starts. You have to let this shit out, you have to move through this shit, to make way for happiness.
Happiness is pain. Happiness is tears. Happiness is hard stuff happening and you still waking up each day and living life.
Another dude chipped in, passionately saying that life is ours for the taking. Break open. Let the light shine through. We all have it within us and around us. Take life by the balls and fucking do it.
What a moment.
We embraced. We went our separate ways.
Lesson.
Break open. Let the light shine through.
