Leave it alone and let it heal.

Some time ago I caught myself in the middle of reconstructing what I should have said to a friend of mine when we discussed the issues in our friendship. The conversation hadn’t gone as well as I hoped it would. It hadn’t gotten to the point of hurling insults at each other, but it had lacked a level of clarity I had hoped would release all the friction that had built up between us. We ended our conversation on a cordial note, but I knew our friendship would likely see no change, it would remain in this polite but distant space. This conversation had happened two years before this moment, yet there I was, still mulling over the sting of it.

I have noticed that I have a habit of getting lost in the painful interactions of my past. If it never got fully addressed, completely fixed or reached a conclusion satisfactory enough for me, I am going to have moments of recall, where it takes up some space in my head, leaving me feeling disturbed and restless, almost as if it just happened. And I find that to be such a drag. Because I want to flow with things as they are, move forward, without having to feel the descending ache of stagnancy that accompanies rehashing old painful memories. What I also find frustrating is that I could even have embraced the growth and lessons from that moment, and be deeply be aware that I am no longer even that bothered, but my thoughts still lead me to linger on a past hurt, and suddenly I experience the feeling of it all again, like it just happened.

It got me thinking about this Tiktok I watched the other day. A 102 year old woman was sharing lessons she had learned throughout her life. In the clip, she says,

“What i’ve learned is that you can either hang on to the pain, or hang on to what the pain has taught you. It’s like when you cut your arm, and you have a scab. You can keep picking at that scab cause it kinda hurts good, but when you stop picking at it and let it heal, you can look at it and say, oh I know what you are, I know who you are. When you actually live through the process, and learn the lessons that you have to learn from that, then you can heal and as you heal, it’s just a scar.”

I said Ma’am, why are you reading me like this? My habit of recalling and sitting in my past memories, and letting these old feelings wash over me, is almost a guilty pleasure. It allows me to bask in my hurt feelings, and that somehow soothes my hurt ego. But it also has the undesired effect of keeping me feeling stuck, still controlled by past thoughts, and unable to access the full healing I want.

So to my fellow girlies who have a pattern of mulling over past painful thoughts and memories, there is some freedom to the realization that we can also do our part in monitoring how often, and how long we let ourselves linger there. Because we can’t wonder why the pain still feels present, when we are still revisiting it. We don’t have to be hard on ourselves for having these moments, we can be gentle with this realization and give ourselves space to allow the healing to occur, while knowing that wounds heal faster, when we leave it alone and let it heal.