Friday, January 20, 2006

Living for the day...

“My life got cold, it happened many years ago”. Popular music group Girls Allowed sang (but did not write that). Every Winter we turn on the heaters; dust the bicycle lights; wonder how we will fit all of our fruit and vegetable portions in when we have no desire for cold salads and our healthy lunchtime sandwiches have been replaced by a piping hot greasy cheese pasty. Somehow I imagine though that the song probably has nothing to do with the cold of the winter season. Life got cold because of its contents. What life offered got cold.

A friend of mine had an on-off relationship with a boy loser for more than a year. He was unpredictable; dangerous; unreliable; untrustworthy; a cheat; a coward.

Most significantly, though, he was a victim. I’m not excusing him. Rather I’m saying that our past shapes our future and our present. He was a victim of bullying; of vicious mind-games played on him by a group of his peers each with their own mental weaknesses. The path was long and winding.

“My life got cold, it happened many years ago”. I was bullied for many years myself. If I’m honest the depth of mental torture I suffered every day does not get much deeper. But I’m still here, alive, in one perfectly functioning piece. I‘m blooming lucky. I’ve undeniably been shaped by my past. I take seeing others in suffering as a personal tragedy. If someone seems distressed or worried I automatically enter some strange gear of honest ‘self help’ textbook guru. The honesty is a problem. When someone said to me “You just don’t like me” the other week I said nothing. I do not like them. If I like you I’ll bore you to death with my over poetic verse regarding your most appealing traits (though only when I feel that something unfair has been said or done). My friend with the ex-loser boyfriend thinks of him every day. She misses the physical stuff mostly. She also thinks of him because she’s not convinced that he won’t come back. It makes her angry that he probably never thinks of her. It is self-inflicted mind games. I suggested that she meet with him on neutral ground just to ‘catch up’ over coffee (to show that the spark was never there in this new honest light). She can’t do that because she is repulsed by him. I felt stupid warning her but I said “you need to move on and reach that point where he is fully gone”; “Otherwise before you know what has happened your life will seem pointless, you can’t shake that feeling, that emotion easily”. “Everything that you do, or even achieve will be a bitter reminder of what he did to you”.

I know the importance of letting things go. Sometimes dealing with them, closing them off can be very difficult but doing something new because of something old can be devastating. The past can shape the future and the present but in doing that you should remain at the controlling helm.

My life got cold…Yes it did but it happened many years ago.

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