Feel Your Feelings For Such Is Life

So I was talking to my wife last night, about the past and the future.

Well, at first I was alone, smoking a cigar and enjoying the cool night air amidst the mostly uneventful resolution of another day.

Actually, I take that back. I wasn’t really alone.

Me and Mother Killdeer were spending time together.

To be quite honest, Mother Killdeer was not too happy with me sitting so close to her nest and the lone egg housed within it but she finally stopped barking at me and accepted my presence as something that she was just going to have to deal with.

So we sat.

Shortly thereafter my wife walked outside and we started talking.

We talked for a long time.

It was great because I’ve been so wrapped up in the past for so long that it was beginning to become a bit debilitating. There has really been no future in my mind over the past few months. All I’ve been able to see is one miserable moment after another.

However, I’ve recently come to discover that my life doesn’t in fact suck and that not taking care of myself the way that I should has introduced a great deal of negative energy into my spirit.

I think that all of life is about energy; be it positive or negative.

I think that we feed off of this energy and we respond to it every second of every day.

But that’s neither here nor there at the moment.

What I’m trying to tell you is that I’ve been trying really hard to make healthier decisions over the past week and my mind is slowly but surely reaping the rewards.

I wouldn’t say that I’m experiencing some fresh wave of happiness but I think that I’m probably experiencing a steady current of okay-ness, if that’s such a thing.

Contentment might be a better word.

I don’t know what to call it.

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My wife and I, we talked about our jobs and how thankful we are to have them.

We talked about our daughter and how parenting is hard but we’re probably getting better at it as we go along.

I’m learning that it’s okay to be hurt. It’s also okay to open up about your pain; to throw caution to the wind and let it all go / out. It’s hard to do that if you’re really focused on your reputation.

Luckily for me, I threw my reputation into the trash in 2012.

Speaking of 2012, we talked about that too and all of the weird things that we went through that year and how you know you’re finally over somebody when you stop checking their social media profiles.

We talked about things like church and how both of us have been hurt by a few people in the church over the past 6 years yet we still really want to be a part of one.

We talked about how even though we will never really be able to go back, we were really thankful for how our church family at the time loved on us and embraced us and ultimately trusted me to lead them again. I know that I’ve let a lot of them down over the past couple of years and even though I shouldn’t beat myself up for it, I do sometimes.

I know that it is important for me to always speak my truth and to always be true to what I am and what I feel is right for myself and my family even if it lets other people down but I still feel alone sometimes and I feel like this is the reason why.

Even so, I’m so thankful for the people who have loved me at my absolute worst and I won’t ever forget how that felt.

Then we looked at each other and we looked at the sky and we talked about how humid it was. We could tell that it was really humid because we could see it on our car windshields.

Then she went inside to go to bed and I finished my cigar.

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I want you to know something.

Life is really, really great and people will treat you all sorts of ways; good and bad and mostly somewhere in between.

You will get hurt and you will have to just be hurt for a while before you get better.

This is an important thing to accept because so many of us feel like we can just push our hurt to the back of our minds and pretend like it isn’t there.

But you can’t skip the being hurt part of life.

You can’t just pretend like it isn’t there.

Being hurt is a very important part of your journey.

Working through your pain and finding healing is a vital stop on the way to where you’re going.

You’ll be angry sometimes and that’s okay.

You’ll be bitter sometimes and that’s also okay.

Sometimes you’ll even swear to yourself and to anybody else who cares to listen to you that you’ll never, ever be able to forgive that person or those people for what they did to you and you know what?

You might be right.

Even so, don’t let anybody make you feel bad for it.

Don’t let anybody make you feel bad for being angry.

Don’t let anybody make you feel bad for being hurt.

Don’t let them.

Ever.

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You are precious and your story is precious and it is also rare.

Your beginning and your end and all of the things in the middle are yours and there’s nobody in this world who can ever take that from you, even if they try (and they will).

Never, ever, ever be ashamed of what you’ve gone through and how you feel about it right here, right now.

Healing will come but only when the time is right.

So feel your feelings. Every single one of them.

And never apologize for them.

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Mother Killdeer left last night. I went outside to check on her this morning and she was gone and so was her egg.

This made me sad but such is life.

Such is life.