Selective Memory

I’ve thought a lot about how far I’ve come and where I’m at right now.

I’ve had some flashbacks to college – some fun times I had that for some reason I choose to forget. It’s funny how your mind will do that – you remember things that fit into the framework of reality in your head. The framework in my head tells me I’ve always been alone and have had no friends. And as we all know, what you believe, you manifest. But I don’t want to discuss what to do from here on out, I want to discuss what happened in the past – to disprove even my own “facts”.

Sure, I didn’t ever really have the “best friends” I wanted, but what I wanted was my own self-love, self-acceptance and self-approval, so I really wasn’t going to find that in someone else. I just didn’t KNOW that at the time.

But my flashback was about going to the pool in my apartment complex one summer with some of my college friends. Nothing big, I just remembered walking and talking on my way there and back. I remember a beach ball or volleyball or something. Oh, that gives me more memories! Playing volleyball. Going to the animal shelter and playing with the animals. Going tubing down the river. Hanging out at someone’s apartment, or playing music and dancing around my own with my roommate. A birthday party when my roommate baked me a cake. Good memories.

And somehow, in my head, when everything is done and over with, I tell myself, “You are alone. No one cares about you. You have no friends.” And I down-play my experiences, “I only did that once. I never usually do that. That was a rare occurrence. Normally that wouldn’t happen. Normal people do that stuff ALL the time. Normal people have stuff going on ALL the time. I don’t.”

So the feeling of loneliness remains, and I have to work really hard to remember the good times, because it doesn’t fit into my framework of reality. How sad is that? Deep down it is a feeling that I don’t deserve it. Deep down it is a feeling of not wanting to be disappointed by expecting so much. Deep down it is a feeling that the experience is not enough to fill my heart and heal my wounds.

I know now that that is LITERALLY all in my head, and what that actually means. I am now capable of giving myself the self-love that heals those thoughts. Finally. Seriously, I would have appreciated things so much more if I had just KNOWN this earlier. Who knows what my life would have been like…

Pause. Thinking like that never gets anyone anywhere. You can’t think about what could have been. You can’t live in the past. Now I DO know! Think about what lies AHEAD, now that I know this! Wonderful things. I have some things I need to clean up in preparation for my awesome fulfilling life, but it will be brilliant. Be happy and hopeful. My life isn’t over. I am YOUNG. I had to learn things in a certain order, and that is completely okay. Now I am ready for a joyous, social, sunny, beautiful life.