It occurs to me how much time I spend trying to right past wrongs. Big, heart-wrenching things and small, trivial things that should never have became things but they did. I don't even realize I'm doing it most of the time, but I basically walk around all day imagining how things should have turned out or where I went wrong or what I did to deserve something or why I treated someone the way I did and what meaning they all hold. I still hold out for some kind of redemption of sorts. I refuse to believe in the reality of certain things and instead search for some way to turn it all around. It goes something like this:
"Once I met a woman who’d been attacked by a
man as she walked home from a party. By the time I met her she lived in
a group home for those with brain injuries. Her own injury was the
result of the attack, her head having hit the sidewalk so hard in the
course of it that she’d never be the same again. She was incapable of
living alone, incapable of so very much, and yet she remembered just
enough of her former life as a painter and teacher that she was
miserable in the group home and she desperately longed to return to her
own house. She refused to accept the explanations given to her as to why
she couldn’t. She had come to fervently believe that in order to be
released she had only to recite the correct combination of numbers to
her captors, her caretakers. 93480219072, she’d say as they fed her and bathed her and helped her get ready for bed. 6552091783. 4106847508. 05298562347.
And on and on in a merciless spiral. But no matter what she said, she
would never crack the code. There was no code. There was only the new
fact of her life, changed irrevocably. I
understood her monumental desire and her groundless faith: I believed
that I could crack a code too. That my own irrevocably changed life
could be redeemed if only I could find the right combination of things.
That in some
indefinable and figurative way that would make it okay for me to live
the rest of my life." (-Cheryl Strayed, Dear Sugar)
The clarity of those words hit me like a ton of bricks. It's easy to recognize the futility of reciting a 10-digit code as a way to change something that happened to you and make it all OK again. But it's not so easy to spot the hopelessness in the constant, desperate searching, in its various forms, that fills up the day far too often. Always looking for the right thing, the person, the experience, the opportunity, that holds the power to alter reality.
Maybe for me this comes from my deeply embedded sense of justice I've always had. Or my belief that I can make things happen, for better or for worse through sheer determination and hard work. It doesn't matter. It's a pattern that needs to change. It's time to learn that it's actually OK to have the strength to say that some things will never be right. It will never be OK that some things happened. Knowing is far away, if it comes at all. That's powerful stuff.
I'll end with this:
"Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be.
Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on
really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a
small, quiet room. Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start here."
