Dear, guys – welcome back to Letters From Liz!
I hope everyone enjoyed the first few days of the new year, and I hope the first weekend of 2020 is a happy, positive, and adventurous one for you.
Now, let’s get straight to the point: I don’t believe in New Year’s Resolutions.
Again, I’m not trying to be all pessimistic here, but resolutions for me just never worked out; it was either I aimed too high or gave up on them once the feeling of a “new year” vanished. I try to keep my goals for the new year as simple as possible: just hope that the new year brings happiness and peace and blah-blah-blah…
Whatever.
Although I don’t really like making resolutions, I feel the need to make a huge change in my life for the new decade. You see, although I am quite happy and living my life the way I’d like to, I feel like I’m still holding onto things that I should’ve let go. In other words, I still carry around grudges and resentment that I should’ve resolved years ago. Maybe I wasn’t ready to, maybe I’ll never be ready to fully come out and let things go like they never happened, but I’m tired of carrying them around like unwanted baggage.
I want to leave my past in the past and my last decade in the last decade.
I want to leave the hurt, little teenage girl in the past because that isn’t who I am at almost 26. I want to leave the envy and jealousy, the pain, the insecurities, and the hatred I felt in the last decade towards people who wronged me and scarred me. I want to leave those doubts, those negative thoughts, those memories behind because I’m just tired of carrying it. Of course, some of my life I will never be able to fully let go; it’s why it’s called trauma and some of it will just be too heavy and traumatic for me to let it be, but for the most part, I’m tired of allowing it to define me, I’m tired of having to relive some of it within new scenarios in my life that may feel familiar to it, and I’m tired of it allowing me to be bitter and unwilling to forgive.
My resolution for this year, and for all years to come, is to forgive myself, the people, the events, and the circumstances that the last decade as put me through. I want to be able to one day write a message to old friends of mine and simply say “I’m sorry for leaving you unannounced, I was young, selfish, and too cowardly to handle things like an adult. I hope you’re living a great life”. I want to be able to hear the person’s name that influenced my toxic and suicidal behavior back in high-school without having flashbacks of that time, and simply say “I forgive you, I hope your life is going well.” I want to be able to see my ex every now and then, whether that be through pictures or videos or mutual friend interaction online and not think about all the wrong that happened, but say “I forgive you, I’m sorry for my part of it all, and I hope you are living out your dreams.” I want to take my 18-year-old self, forgive her for her mistakes and flaws, and just let her the fuck go.
I want a new, clean slate. I want my baggage to be empty because I emptied it myself and threw it out, not because I just threw everything back in the closet to disguise it. I truly want to forgive everything that has happened in my life; the people who hurt me, the people I hurt, the events that took place, the mistakes that I made. I want to genuinely forgive it all.
Of course, this is going to take more than a couple of blog posts, therapy sessions, and changes to finally be okay with everything and everyone. It’s going to take an immense amount of time to unlearn old habits and defensive mechanisms and truly see things through another perspective. I just don’t want to feel resentment anymore.
I just want to live my life in peace, knowing that the things that haunt me don’t have the power to do so anymore.
And that’s what I hope this year teaches me: to finally forgive,
Letters From Liz. 