What goes on inside my head is actually even worse than this cheesy photo
Like most members of the rat race, I have a long commute to the office. I use to take the El to work but a few years ago a new job landed me in the western suburbs where my company keeps its IT staff and data center. It’s a 20+ mile commute and public transportation is not an option. That means driving an average of 40 minutes in the AM (garage to parking lot) and an hour in the PM. This gives me a lot of time to think. Unfortunately, my mind wanders to places best left untraveled.
A song will come on the radio and it will remind me of something, someone. A different place and another time in my life. A missed or messed up opportunity. That memory, bad decision, horrible experience of lost love or betrayal that sneaks up and attacks my happy. Reopening a wound that I finally allowed myself to believe might be healed.
Old Single Mom summed it up much better than I can:
We all have THAT THING that still takes us out at the knees – that memory/decision/thing/death/betrayal/love that can still creep up on us and attack our everything, daggers drawn. Flanked by grief, we are forced to drop everything and attend to the gaping, dripping wound a-fucking-gain….Dammit. Why am I not past this, yet? This was so long ago. What more is there to do? — Screw You Taylor Swift
Everyone has some experience from the past they’d rather not rerun in the DVR of their mind’s eye. My problem is, I have over three decades of them and they are starting to clutter my mind the way a pile of garbage fills up a hoarder’s living room. I need the guys from Garage Gold to come clean my head out and carry those old memories away. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t get any money for them.
I hate the word closure because it brings to mind too many images of touchy-feely dippy hippies™ wanting to talk about their feelings about everything. But it does apply here. For the majority of these memories, I don’t have the proper closure. You rarely get to expose the misdeeds of the person who betrayed you to the world. Where was social media in the 90s! You don’t get to know why she chose him instead of you. You don’t get to find out if you should have fought harder.
Destiny is the choices we make and the paths we didn’t take
I really need to stop being so hard on myself about things that happened in the past. In my younger days, I didn’t have the necessary resources and tools to deal with this thing called Life and all its intricacies. And life is pretty good now. But I still cannot always ignore the voices of the demons in my head.
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