Pain and Growth
Enough With That Story You Keep Telling Yourself
It's becoming who you are
You Messed Up
So you’ve made a few mistakes in your life that you wish you hadn’t made. You wish you could turn back the hands of time and undo them all.
Maybe you stayed way too long in that toxic relationship and now you’re mad at yourself. Maybe you wouldn’t stop cheating on your spouse and now they’re gone and never coming back! Maybe you lived wild and fast and now you’re stuck with a horrible disease you must live with for the rest of your life.
Maybe you wasted so much of your time and energy doing things you now regret and can’t even understand why you did it. Maybe you’re drowning in debt, risking bankruptcy because you were reckless in your youth.
You’re struggling to let go because you knew what you were doing was wrong yet you did it, anyway. Now you’re hurt and your heart is broken but there’s nothing you can do but bury your head in your lap and cry.
The thoughts you think daily and the emotions you feel constantly create your future.
Snap Out Of It
While these experiences are no doubt painful, you can’t continue to carry them with you year after year. That’s torture.
If you keep telling yourself the same story over and over again, it becomes your identity. It becomes who you are and you live your life every day in that dreadful emotional state.
That old story becomes the state in which you function and what will happen is that your future begins to look a lot like your past and you will never be free of it. You’ll suffer every day, and suffering will become your lifelong companion.
You’ll always be sad, always angry, and always miserable. And you will have yourself — not those who hurt you — to blame for allowing your suffering to become your identity.
So cut it out now! Enough is enough. Say that to yourself. Snap your fingers and snap out of your funk!
The thoughts you think daily and the emotions you feel constantly create your future. If all you feel daily is misery and despair, then your future will have more misery and despair waiting for you.
Is that what you want? No? I didn’t think so.
You aren’t that person you were in the past. If you feel pain about your past, it means you’ve grown. Celebrate your growth and stop feeding your regrets.
You live in a universe where you get to decide who you want to be.
Break the Cycle
Yes, you can! You can break the cycle if you’re tired of feeling shitty. You must be tired of feeling the same old way to break the cycle.
You’re not the first person to mess up your life and you will not be the last. We live and we learn from our mistakes.
Let the old identity go and figure out who you want to become tomorrow. Decide the emotions you'd want to feel and practice feeling them. You just may like it.
Be that new person and feel those emotions, even if it doesn’t come naturally. Know what else isn’t natural for you to feel every day? Misery and despair. Those aren’t natural either, but you learned to feel them. You can unlearn them and learn to feel something else.
When you keep holding on to an experience that's limiting you from experiencing the joys of today, you are robbing yourself of the life you came here to live. Instead of holding on that the painful experience, take the lessons — all of it — out of the experience and then move on from it.
Yes, it’s not easy, but what other options are there? Would you rather feel sad and angry all the time or would you rather not?
You must decide.
You get absolutely nothing from holding on to a story that’s hurting you. Write a new story where you use your pain as your power.
Make that decision that you want to feel differently, then commit to it.
When you keep holding on to an experience that’s limiting you from experiencing the joys of today, you are robbing yourself of the life you came here to live.
Your New Story
Things happen for a reason, even your pain has a purpose. It’s here to teach you something. It’s here to grow you.
You live in a universe where you get to decide who you want to be. Who do you want to be now and what is the emotional state of that person?
Do you want to be a person who has been through some difficult things, risen from them, and now teaches others not to make the same mistakes, or do you want to be the sad, miserable person who can’t let go of the pain from the past and wears it like a badge?
Do you want to be a person who is haunted by their past or a person who is strengthened by the pain of their past?
You get to decide who you want to be, where you want to go, and what you want to do. You’re made for so much more and you deserve to live a life that is far beyond the story you tell yourself.
You came here to live a life that is beyond your identity based on the painful story, so pick yourself up and start rebuilding your life. You have so much work to do.
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