Face It, Accept It, and Move On

By Shelby Gorman

What do we do when we find ourselves faced with our past? Our well-meaning friends will tell us to face it, deal with it, and go on with our lives. But exactly what does that mean? And why can't "it" stay packed up in the back of our mind, quietly taking up space we don't need anyway?

Our life is like a house. You live your life in your house, quietly tending your daily chores, cleaning the rooms, doing the laundry, and working in the garden. We try to make it a nice place where we feel comfortable and we can invite friends to share our space. Sometimes, however, bad things happen in our house. How we deal with it can shape our lives.

Picture your Sunday afternoon, sitting contentedly reading the newspaper, planning out your leisure day. Suddenly a man breaks through your front door with a crash, and you find yourself tied up helplessly as this man proceeds to plunder your house, room by room, destroying our treasured items and stealing whatever catches his fancy. He finally leaves, but the fear strikes into your heart, and you find yourself unable to move for many hours, until we finally crawl to a phone and call for help.

This happens, both literally and figuratively, every day to women everywhere. I guess you could say this is the one uniting fact of women everywhere (besides childbearing!) At some point in our lives we all feel helpless and plundered. How each of us deals with this wanton destruction of our lives is how we differ as individuals.

Some women are strong enough to deal with the matter from the start, immediately fighting back the attacker and calling for help, or just grabbing the gun from him and chasing him off, turning aggressor into victim in moments. These women will be back to their normal routine the next day, describing their adventure to anyone who will listen

Others will lay silent, waiting for the chance to grab the phone and call 911, a neighbor, or a family member. These women will ultimately be more cautious, buying a stronger door and lock, maybe looking over their shoulder occasionally when they are alone, but all in all, none the worse for wear.

Then there are those who lay quiet during the attack, and never tell anyone what happened until years later, if ever. These women are the ultimate victims. Some will sit feeling guilty that it was their fault in the first place that the man appeared to ravage their home. Others may just get up, walk out the ruins of the front door and never look back at their home. Some will look around at the destruction and quietly pack up all the damaged items into boxes, lock them in a room, and choose to never open that door again. These are the quiet victims, as their home will look pretty much the same as before, but a close observer will notice small things missing, and other things placed to fill the empty spaces. It is for these women that I write this.

Why does it matter if you never open that door again? The rest of your house is acceptable for company, and you never needed that room anyway, right? And you won't miss those broken items, as you can just buy new things to take their place.

But you do need that room. You do need those treasured parts of yourself that are broken and packed away in boxes. The analogy here is a home. The reality is your life and your mind. To ever be whole, you can't lock things away never to be seen again. The Goddess won't allow you to be less than whole.

So we go back to the question of How. How do you face it? How do you deal with it? How do you move on?

You face it by letting the memories surface. You relive all the nasty, brutal things that happened to you. Invite someone you trust to share it with you, so in your mind you have a big, burly guy in the living room to protect you when the invader busts through your front door. After you've remembered everything you can stand, you'll probably cry a lot, have nightmares for a few days, but in the end you'll feel lighter on your feet. Remember, you just unpacked a lot of boxes, but once you put everything where it belongs, you'll find your space is a lot more livable!

Next is the question, How Do I Accept It? Well, once you allow yourself to explore that room and all the boxes therein, you've done a lot of it. At this point you need to step back with a view of everything at once, and realize that you didn't break everything. A person who had no key to your front door, no rights to your property, came into your space and caused the destruction. Maybe he wheedled his way through the door, but you did not invite this invasion! Once you can understand this, and look at the memories objectively and without feeling nauseous, you've accepted it. Just know it as a part of your life, as something that happened but will not reoccur, you've accepted it.

Then comes the hard part: Move On. In our analogy, that would entail sorting though each item, discarding what could not be fixed, fixing and reintegrating those pieces we wish to include in the décor of the house. Once all the boxes were empty, that'd be finished. Unfortunately the mind is not as easy to sort through!

Each and every memory would have to be examined, sorted, and dealt with. Most of us don't have the determination to do this, as it takes a lot of energy and bravery to be able to do this with each and every traumatic event of our lives! An alternative course of action would be to pick a box, or major event, and take a quick look to see what is included there. Get the broad view, instead of a piece-by-piece inspection.

After you know what is in the box you're looking at, you look at its contents objectively, relaxing and just letting your mind look over the bits and pieces in the box. What was broken by this event? Was it your innocence, your trust in men, your love for a certain person turned by betrayal? How did your personality change? How did your life change in goals, or relationships? After you can look back at this, and think and remember without being overcome with emotion, you can move on.

If you have a lot of boxes, this is going to take quite a bit of time, but you'll gain a better understanding of yourself, and what's more, you'll appreciate yourself, your strengths and weaknesses, and why you've lived your life the way it's become. Then if you find you want to make changes, it'll be much easier, as you'll have gained trust in yourself. Hopefully you'll also have regained the beauty of your soul that the Goddess gave you and someone else tried to take away.

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