We Need Our Old Wounds, Even When They Ache.
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Some days, you wake up, and you feel the ache again. Stuff from years ago comes back to haunt you.
The numbness you learned to transcend, over months of pressing on towards new chapters and new growth, lies in your bones. The stifling, choking sadness lies in your throat. Maybe tears come, or maybe they don’t.
You have no choice but to stare at the walls for three hours, or to go back to bed when the rest of the world is drinking their third cup of coffee and licking their fingers as they forage through their to-do lists of the day.
It is then that you have a choice: worry and fret and wonder why you’re hurting, or embrace the familiarity with an attitude of acceptance, knowing that wounds don’t heal and then cease to exist.
Healing doesn’t happen in a way that allows us to look back and see precisely when we got over something, bidding it goodbye once and for all, for it to never enter our consciousness or heart or psyche again. No, it never works that way.
Sometimes we don’t know we have made it through a tumultuous period of our life, or that we have overcome a traumatic experience for the most part, until we’re 10 years down the road, when we notice that there have been months strung together where we weren’t aching or raving or raging or dragging ourselves out of bed.
Old wounds are bound to beckon you back to their darkness every once in a while.
The anxiety is going to culminate into a rapid heart rate, hyperventilating sobs, and sweaty armpits randomly one morning, leaving you a snotty mess in a gas station parking lot on the way to work, or still in the shower, knees buckled, hands tucked around your head.
Or the depression will sink in again, asking for isolation and a body buried in blankets, the sun too harsh to bear, or the clouds pressing you down, pushing you back into that metaphorical, emotional cave you once lived in days or months or years ago.
Don’t spend more time making the episode harder to handle by jumping to any conclusion about why it happened. Don’t search. Don’t get superstitious. Don’t become part of the monkey mind.
Just know it is happening, then just let it happen. Let it exist, and watch it as it comes and goes.
If you’ve made it this far, you already know that it’s temporary, and fretting over the reasons that you’re feeling familiar pain will only exacerbate the condition, conditioning yourself to run away from your darkness, instead of accepting it as part of who you are.
The truth is that we need our wounds, just as much as they need us to justify their existence. Yet, we don’t need to live in the realities that they call us back to when those don’t fit the lives we have created.
We wrestled, fought, surrendered, then grew and bloomed from these wounds, so when old wounds ache, dress them up delicately, wait it out, then carry on your way.
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Rebekah Kolbe, aka The Moonchilde to her equally eccentric friends, is a writer and newb Yoga teacher in the Michiana area in passionate cultivation of a consciously loving and creative lifestyle. When she isn’t writing sassy and sappy personal essays or exploring esoteric psychology, adoring her loved ones, practicing Yoga, cooking, making music, or walking in the woods, she is working for the creatively philanthropic company called MudLOVE. To get connected to more of her musings, go here.
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