November seems to be a tough month. The days are shorter, it's dark now before I get home. It rains more. It's always feels to me like it's the darkest month of the year. And it seems so fitting that this November I found myself facing all the crap I'd shoved into a storage unit that I really wanted to forget about and ignore for a while... quite frankly ignore forever thank you very much.
Mind you this is not just your average storage unit, it's the one that we all have a key to where we shove the junk that hurts. The stuff the bully said on the playground when we were kids, the crappy review from our first employer that we took too personally, the little bits of hurt and pain that we collect over a lifetime. And every so often we find that we've shoved so much in we can't get the door shut anymore. (Or every so often some well meaning soul opens the door looking for an extra blanket for the guest room.)
Then we find ourselves taking stock of what we're holding on to and determine if we should pack it away or just let it go.
Well, my time to purge showed up in November. It started coming on as a general funk, I've been on edge for weeks (grumpy, a little overly sensitive and overly judgmental, generally uncomfortable and more reserved than usual), and showed up with tri colored post-it notes labeled "KEEP, STORE, and TOSS" after hearing a message on relationships that hit so close to home that had it been a grenade I'd be living in a refrigerator box under a bridge tonight.
I then proceeded to purchase a book that came highly recommended by a good friend. I read it and came to the following:
"...pain has a way of clipping our wings and keeping us from being able to fly. And if it's left unresolved for very long, you can almost forget that you were ever created to fly in the first place."
And in that moment it all came rushing back. All the "you are so stupid, you'll never learn", the "you're ruining my life", "you deserve to be alone", all the way to "this is all your fault" with all the horrible cuts and the horrible fear and the horrible guilt that came along for the ride. I sat there and heard them all ring through my mind, watched my hands fall into my lap, and I wept. And I knew in that moment that it was time.
For so long I'd held on to my last little bit of well-packed and sorted emotional collateral damage. (Sure I had a little baggage left but it was at least a matching set and ridiculously durable.) I'd stuffed it somewhere -behind several bridesmaid dresses and a pair of "skinny" jeans- in the back of a closet. With a lock. And a brick wall. I'd held onto the belief that all the junk was true. Held onto the belief that it was my fault. Held onto the pain.
There is a part of me that knows a little something about dealing with grief and managing pain. And I believe that we cope with this in stages. We are given what we can manage at the time we are able to handle it. Over the last decade I've dealt with and managed more than I thought I could. And now the worst bit that had been in the deepest place was being called up. It was time.
In that moment, those words were the shock to my system I needed. Over the next 48 hours I realized that over the last several weeks this moment had been orchestrated. From the month to the book to the message that opened the door. I made the conscious decision to lay it down and let it go.
What happened was nothing short of a crazy miracle. As soon as I'd said it, the whole mess was gone, the hurt was gone, and I couldn't for the life of me manage to bring it back. It's not that the memories are gone, but the shadows that came with the memories are gone.
The point in laying all of this out there is this: I know there are a lot of people out there with the same storage unit that's a little overly-full at the moment. The point is not to hold onto it and hide it have it be one more thing you move from place to place as you go through life. Let yourself be open. Be ready. When it's time to lay it down and let it go, jump at the chance.
And remember that you too were created to fly.
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