Emotional wounds do not heal, they are simply treated. There is nothing that will happen in your life that will have no effect on you whatsoever. Everything has repercussions, even if you are not aware of it at the time. Your past will always catch up with you.

The best analogy I can think of is a horror movie where the protagonist thinks he’s done with the nightmare scenario until the walls come down and he finds out that he’s deeper into the nightmare than he could have imagined. If you try to ignore your past, it will come back to haunt you in a big way. However, if you learn to live with your past, it will still bother you at times, but it will be manageable.

Accept who you are. If you are in a bad place and make a conscious decision to change yourself, don’t forget that bad place you came from. I have suffered from severe anxiety. Though I am now a much more well-adjusted person, I can’t hide the fact that this anxiety is a part of who I am. I can’t push all of my needless worry aside or pretend that it does not exist or else it will flare up and be worse than it has been in years. I just have to let the anxiety exist in the back of my brain but not let it bubble up to the surface.

This past week, I consciously forced myself to stop worrying. I was physically and emotionally tired of all of the extra time, effort, and stress that it causes, so I literally pressured myself to change the subject when I found myself obsessing over something. But for some reason, my mind could not handle, or was not used to this, and eventually it pushed my anxiety into overdrive until I almost could not function. I guess this is my mind’s way of telling me to not forget where I came from or who I am. I have been defined by this anxiety, and to deny it, even to myself, would be to deny who I am.

You can’t cure anything mentally related. The mind is too powerful to forget or pretend that experiences did not happen. The best you can do is live with and contain them.

People that deny who they are don’t seem to be happy, at least from what I’ve seen on television. Right now, I am watching Spanish-language infomercials because I have to hit ‘3’ in order to turn my television on and this is the Spanish channel. The remote control is at least two feet away so I’m not changing it anytime soon. Though I have no idea what they are saying, I think I can draw the incredibly ignorant, culturally insensitive conclusion that Spanish language personalities do not hide anything about themselves. This one guy has been non-ironically wearing a donkey costume for the past twenty minutes and could not at all give a s**t.

My donkey suit is less tangible, but just as real. I can’t run around all the time in my donkey suit, but I still have to keep it in my closet, because I love my donkey suit, and if I lose all of my other clothes, I will have to wear something.

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