Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Third Degree and Rising.
Yes, I’m having a melancholy moment. It happens. Not often, but when it does, I write through it and I’m okay.
“It’s impossible to bring good things into your life and keep a positive mindset when your life is full of shit,” a woman contended in her email to me regarding the Law of Attraction. “How am I supposed to manifest good things and stay positive when everything in my life is so bad?”
It’s probably the question I hear most often in Law of Attraction community groups and from those who have given it a whirl and failed. To them, the advice to not think about their pain is insensitive, unrealistic. And—frankly—just not humanly possible.
For me, I’ve found that the best way to bring good things into your life when the moments are particularly tough is not to ignore the pain but to face it head-on and work through it. You have to come to peace with what’s hurting you before you can move on to something better. That’s not easy and it takes work. It’s the same process as grieving a loss because it IS a loss. Ignoring it simply puts you in your own walled-off tower and out of touch with your emotions. Though a lot of people prefer to ignore than to live freely.
We all have ways of working through our pain if we only look and are willing to commit to healing that pain by treating the cause—or at least the symptoms. We medicate ourselves in different ways—some through alcohol and indiscriminant sex. Others through their art—music or painting.
For me, it’s writing it out that’s cathartic and eventually healing. Facing the monsters head-on and fighting them to the death, and sometimes coming out of that battle victorious but quite bloodied.
Part of me is a little surprised at the good things coming into my life now, considering how torn up I was a few months ago. It’s hard to accept the death of something when the desire for it is as deep as it ever was.
But I grieved for a solid month, then focused hard—hard!—on working through the pain head-on, building a novel around a fictional situation but where the emotions were very real and I could work through them in a safe setting without actually killing anything.
By the end of the second month, I was in a somewhat different place emotionally. Still hurting but with enough distance to function normally and productively and try to build new dreams and newer desires. Who knows if anyone will ever read that book when it comes out? It was for me and me alone, my own prescription to get me to a better place where I could deal with my losses and work through them.
More time has passed. Good things are happening again, though none are particularly eventful and none live up to the visions shown to me long ago. None of them replace what it was I wanted that is lost to me now. But I’m at a place that’s calm and hopeful for the future. Over the months, I’ve reached a place where I’ve blessed the past, where I’m thankful for what was there (or what I at least thought was there), and where I’ve released it all with love.
I am content with my life at the moment and mostly happy now but there is still a sadness in my heart that is less a burden than it is an honoring of the fact that I was able to let myself feel deeply again when I hadn’t thought it possible. Having an occasional melancholy moment doesn’t make me permanently distraught or helpless or unable to enjoy my life the other 99.9999999999 percent of the time. To a large degree, I know I will feel deeply yet again because of those moments that remind me of the depth of my emotions and the strength of both my passion and compassion.
If such an opportunity ever again comes to me, I’ll welcome it with open arms. For now, I concentrate mostly on the present moment and a little distance into the future but never as far as I ever did in the past.
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