| Letting the past haunt you can be a really hard thing for someone in recovery. Sometimes for no reason at all I will get a cringe of a memory or something will remind me of a person, place, or thing from my past. Things I had done, people I did not treat well, or behaviors that really can make me sick if I think about it for too long. Sometimes people can say something you need to hear at the exact right moment and it is exactly what you need to hear. A random person once told me DO NOT LOOK BACK, You are not going that way! I have since repeated this to myself every time I have these flashbacks into my past.
I used to think about the things I had done or said and I would completely shut my mind off in fear that if I even thought about it too long it made them real. So, I would shrug it off with a big whatever!
Today, these occurrences in my past are the only thing that has gotten me where I am. It is now the fear of ever being back there. I can revisit them in my mind and even though a lot of them were awful memories, they are still my memories which make me who I am.
The lying, the manipulating, the secrets, the scandals, the dramas, seem like a foreign concept now. However, I can never forget that was once me and I have to do work every day for the rest of my life to keep the me, that I am now intact. When, I decided to get sober, what I feared most was my Pandoras Box being opened but I was not fooling anybody but myself. That box had been opened for quite sometime.
I realize that God gave me that life so that I could be all the more grateful for the life I have found in recovery and sobriety. Of course everything had to be so extreme but I have learned that not everything has to be such a big deal, with the exception of my recovery. Love is not boastful and it is certainly not loud. The beautiful things in life are not what you can put a price tag on, it is the things people say when you need to hear it, the way that people look at you when they really mean it.
The first time I had heard something in my recovery that was just what I needed to hear. It was the first saying that really resonated with me. It was simple and profound. It was a saying that set the tone for me to deal with understanding that all that has happened to me has made me who I am, so I visit for a second because although they are painful those memories keep it green for me but I never look back for too long because I AM NOT GOING THAT WAY!
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