Pain of the past and fear of the future

Have you ever been in love? What kind of a question is that; of course you have! It is a strange feeling, isn’t it? It makes you exceptionally vulnerable, it closes your eyes to every negative part of your significant other, it opens up your heart and it means that you let someone get inside your mind and soul either to make you happy or mess you up. You give a piece of yourself to someone and a big part of your life depends on this specific person –your life is not yours anymore.

Then one day, they do something stupid; or you realize that they kept doing something that bothered you for a long period of time, though it now suffocates you. You just awaken to reality which is not full of hearts and flowers and you notice that your relationship really hurts you – or even worse it is ruined and for some reason you suddenly are left alone.

Whether it comes out of the blue or it is something you have been anticipating, being dumped or deciding to leave is rarely pleasant, especially when you have lived romance in all its glory! Maybe your reasons were an affair or the fact that your ex-lover felt that you were not the right person for him or her. Maybe it ended because your passion was lost or the compromises between you were too many. Maybe your life’s dreams were not similar or you put a lot of pressure on them –whatever, it does not really matter!

What matters is that you felt hurt enough after what you both went through together and you now build up all these defenses and a whole suit of armor so that no one and nothing can hurt you anymore. You are afraid to trust anyone else in your future and at the same time you also regret your past. Your remorse for the time spent and the love given, you may also feel that you wasted your time with this person and what you had was not worthy at all.

You are ready to avoid the same “mistakes” in your future and all you want is to turn back time in order to correct faults and take back what you gave. And you know what? It is ok to feel like this in the beginning because anger and hatred come naturally towards those who hurt us. It is ok to regret because this is the way we learn. But to keep regretting for a long period, is even more wasted time than that you lost with that person.

Faults, mistakes and throwbacks are there to give us a lesson and make us wiser; love is not pain, it couldn’t be! But its illusion is. The beliefs that love always ends badly because it happened once or twice –or even more– automatically creates feelings of fear, pain and loss. Each one’s selfish ego is activated as well, and they don’t want to give another piece of themselves because they want to protect what was once misused. So, they keep their whole self for their own, secured and fortified against any new experience and person.

And what do all these result in? Regret when you look backwards and, simultaneously, fear when you look forwards –in just one word: stagnation.  And it is your choice if you will try to change your perception or you will stay there to grieve for something that does not exist anymore. As someone unknown said ”Scars are there to remind us of where we have been, not where we are headed”. 

Because if regretting when you look backwards is wasted time, feeling scared when you look forwards is even worse!