How My Pain Lost Its Power
A week ago, one night, I couldn’t get to sleep for crying. I’d started thinking about the German guy on campus and how he reminded me of Richard and Gisleson, my arrogant, liberal teachers who didn’t like me and weren’t afraid to try to impose their views of writing on mine. I can’t tell anymore if I’ve ever hated them. I have a problem with feeling guilty about things, so I’ve always made it a point to tell myself that this was their fault. This wasn’t something I had to feel guilty about. But part of what that did was make me hold on to it. What I had for them wasn’t a grudge — it was just that they still had power over me, the power to hurt me, even though they were nowhere remotely near my life anymore.
(And they did hurt me: whenever something reminded me of them.)
So I finally sat myself down and said, “Self, they aren’t hurting you anymore. And you aren’t hurting them by dwelling on this. You are hurting yourself.” So while I know that they bear most of the guilt for being arrogant jerks, I also know that I bear the responsibility to get over it and move on. They’d probably laugh if they knew I held on to what they said to me for this long. They laughed at me when I told them they intimidated me. I’ve always wanted to hate them for how they treated me, for the circumstantial truths they told me about writing that confused me and wracked me for years. I wanted to hold it against them that they didn’t like my religion, and that they threw Flannery O’Connor at me as if her very name would placate me into not writing fantasy.
But now that I’ve made the distinction, now that I know that my misery was with me only because I kept it with me, only because I couldn’t forgive and forget, and therefore kept remembering and hurting myself — now, I have moved on. It took that one realization to do it. In about fifteen minutes, I wiped away their power and my pain by agreeing to let it go.
I know that this is Biblical, and I could make a wonderful Biblical point with it, but I’ll leave everyone to draw their own Biblical points. I’ve spent enough energy getting here.