Living in the past
I am a divorced woman, but have been married 4 times. My first marriage was for love, we were young, thought we knew how to handle love and the responsibility of a relationship and being married. NOPE---wrong, we were too immature and had a lot more growing up to do and had to get a lot of other things out of our systems. It was very painful to walk away from each other, but 18 years later (the year of 911), we both found closure after beating ourselves up for over a decade.
Lesson there, well sometimes we can chase a dream or what we thought was something or someone we loved. When in reality, 18-20 years later, you find out the person you loved no longer exists. You see Eric and I (after he parted ways from his second wife) ran into each other and decided 18 years later to date again, we dated for 6 months and broke up a week before 911. Why we decided to date again? Guilt maybe, thought we still loved each other still, who knows. But what we found were two totally different people. He was no longer the young man I knew, nor was I the young woman he knew and married. I called myself a girl back then, because my mentality and his was about that..... teenagers. What I found was a man in his late 30's who had done drugs and alcohol for so many years that he no longer even looked the same. He and I are the same age and a store patron misstook him to be my father. But, at one point he had told me he wanted the girl back that he loved so many years ago--well the same goes for me. I was no longer 22 years old and 120 lbs. I was a 30 something woman who was now about 150 lbs and had a teenage son, and I owned my own home. I told him that she had went out the window years before. We discovered we both were very different, not just in looks, but in WHO we were. We found out we wasted a lifetime living in the past over someone we no longer knew. The people we loved didnt exist anymore. We parted ways, but had learned a valuable lesson and was able to finally close the door on the past.
I know a lot of people that live in the past, cannot seem to let it go, they let past hurts guide them today in how they treat other people or how close they want to get to someone. I know people that are still carrying a torch for someone that has been long gone for years. Instead of living in the "present" they are loving people they will never see again, and if they did, they will be shocked to find someone totally different.
I quit living in the past--I don't even like to talk about it. I have to really know someone and trust someone to let them in on some of my past. I want to move forward--live in the present and for the future.
My lesson to all of you.... LIVE FOR TODAY AND IN THE PRESENT, let the past go.