WFMW: Process and Let Go

Sunday afternoons I spend with a dear friend.  We end up having the BEST conversations.  And while she could almost be my mother we interact as equals and we learn from each other.

Something I'm learning from her is to process and let go.

You know the old addage--Forgive and Forget.  It's along similar lines.  I think I'm going to term it as Acknowledge, Process, and Move ON.  An example of this process being the post I made on one of my old blogs.  It wasn't until after I had deleted the ENTIRE google account that I thought I probably should have made a copy of the post about my rape, since I'd finally said something about it.  I started to regret that it had not occurred to me prior to deletion.

But truly, I had "acknowledged" it (13yrs later), through the day-long effort of posting it onto the blog I had managed to "process" through it, and now I can "move on" from it.  I don't need to keep that post around to sit and dwell on it.  By dwelling on it, and any peripheral woulda-coulda-shouldas, I'm preventing myself from healing emotionally; and I'm allowing that individual to continue to have power over me.

It's so water-under-the-bridge for me now.  And I'm excited to have made this break-through.

So moving past this epiphany of learning to move on, this weekend we were actually speaking more about her (I wasn't hogging all of the conversation for once!).  Even though it was her dilemnas we were discussing, I walked away with lessons learned for myself as well.  I feel so at peace that I can't itemize our conversation to identify 'what' I learned.  Except the simple fact that we're acknowledging, we're processing, and we're moving on.  And the recognition of the power of words; the power of speech.  (which validates all of us that talk to ourselves! *lol*)

Because afterall, we're on a journey.  Life is a journey of learning and exploration.  And this processing and moving on is working for me--in terms of events in my past, issues with the other side of the family, guilt over my many parenting faux pas, etc.  It kind of reminds me of the title of a book on my mother's bookshelf when I was a youth: Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.  (Mom said the book wasn't very good, but she kept holding on to it because of the title).