Oh, Get Over It!
How I used to loathe the phrase, "Get over it." When I was a young woman, with a string of extremely hurtful love affairs in my wake (not to mention a few lost friends and the harsh words of two outspoken parents ringing in my ears), I found it difficult to get over anything.
Really, how was I supposed to get over anything, without the tools with which to do so? I hadn't gone to Get Over It School. My mother hadn't had the Mother/Daughter Get Over It chat with me when I was a kid. There weren't any articles on How to Get Over It in Modern Teen magazine.
Worst of all, because people wouldn't or couldn't help me, my sadness made them uncomfortable. "You're living in the past! C'mon! Get over it!"
So how did one get over things?
Now that I am an old broad (I'm talking about only myself, so I get to use that phrase, okay?) I am sometimes startled to discover that an old wound of mine has healed. For example, when an old acquaintance tries to "get" me (if you know what I mean), by mentioning a lost love, or the time I lost an award, I don't have to fake indifference - I really do not care anymore! In fact, sometimes I even have to be reminded of how miserable I had been! ("Oh, yeah. I think I remember Bill...")
Then I wonder, "How did I get to this healthy place? I thought it would be such hard work!"
The answer, like a lot of things in life, is simple. I kept moving. One foot in front of the other. New jobs. New dates. New interests. Heck, new haircuts!
The physical distance I put between myself and the hurt worked in conjunction with the chronological distance that time naturally provided.
Motion plus time equalled happiness.
Don't get me wrong. I stared at the bedroom ceiling for years over one employment disaster. In fact, I still have dreams about being the worst radio announcer in the world, which I was.
But here is my point. I allowed myself to feel every emotion as it washed over me. I didn't censor it. However, when it came to the nuts and bolts, or the mechanics of my life, my charted course was straight ahead, no stops.
The visual image, I guess, would be that of a woman crying her eyes out on a ship bound for the New World. No matter how I felt about my past, I had arranged the blueprint of my life so that I was ready for the future, and it was ready for me.
I didn't stand still and wait for happiness to happen.
You've heard of athletes playing on an injury? They call it "playing hurt."
I played sad.
If you are despairing right now, and surrounded by people shrugging off your pain with, "He was a bum! Forget him!" and "You'll find another girl! You were too good for her!" or if you're struggling with grades or your job, I encourage you to continue to make plans every day. Stay in the game. Keep an easy, short-term goal in sight, and meet it. Then set another one.
It's called working from the outside in, and it works! You don't have to stop living to be miserable. You don't have to cut short your mourning period. Just keep that body in motion, and embrace each feeling as it arrives. It won't kill you. It's just a feeling, and experiencing it without telling yourself "Get over it!" will get you to the other side of that emotion.
Then, when you're really ready to start living again, you won't have to struggle up off a couch after six months of vegetating.
Instead, one active, productive day you will look around and say,
"Well I'll be darned. I'm over it."