Last fall I enrolled in a beginner’s memoir writing class through a local literary center.  I went in with mixed expectations –  I knew I had a story to tell but I wasn’t sure what it looked like or if I was ready to tell it.  I certainly didn’t expect to form a bond with five strangers, but I guess that’s what happens when you’re honest and transparent.

As is my style, I stepped right into the darkest parts of my early years, not bothering with a flashlight to guide the way.  I felt my way around, finding the old junk right where I had left it, collecting dust, taking up space, and blocking my path.  I ran into those memories full force and told them as fully and as honestly as I could, knowing that there would be no judgement from my classmates and that the words would go no further than the room in which we gathered.  And sometimes I knocked open old wounds, not completely healed, and felt the hurt anew.

But this time I didn’t shut the door on the memories and lock them back in the dark.  I didn’t numb myself in one of the dozens of ways I’ve learned to over the years.  Instead, I allowed myself to feel the pain, to cry, to accept that the whys of what happened don’t really matter.  I just told my stories the only way I know how, and an amazing thing happened.

I was freed from their grip.

I dragged them into the light, named them, and presented them to others to see, and in doing so they lost their power.  I was seen, heard, validated.  I was shown that yes, these were horrible things and no, they shouldn’t have happened, but I survived and I am more than the sum total of those things. The memories are not behemoths that devour and define me, they are just threads in the unfinished tapestry that is my life.

At the end of the class I ended up with about 20 pages of manuscript. Throughout these pages are woven not only the ugly, but also the good, the calm, the secure.  Somehow through the weeks of writing and sharing I was able to make peace with all that had happened, even that which went unwritten.

I was encouraged by the instructor and classmates to continue the project or to submit what I had for publication as it is, but in the weeks since the class ended I realized that I don’t need to do that because I don’t live there anymore.  I live here in the present, with these people and in this life.  The scars are there but the wounds have healed.  They no longer bleed and I don’t need to nurse them anymore.  I am free to create any ending to this story that I want, and I choose a story that will end with joy, with love, with peace.  

The pages sit in a folder on my desktop, ready for me to return to them should I choose, but for now the past has lost its grip on me, or rather, I have loosened my grip on the past.  I have let it all go, as I have with so many other things over the last few years.  And when I let it go, I opened up space for so much more to join me.  Good things, the things that God has always intended for me.

I was never a prisoner to my past, it was a prisoner to me.

I was holding those memories hostage, ready to use them as bargaining chips, excuses, or ultimatums.  But the only one they tortured was me.  They were never the parasite I thought them to be, rather, I had tethered them to myself with my own rope and knot.  I could never outrun them because I had bound them to me with my own hands. They didn’t want to stay, I forced them to.

So I untied the knot and let them scurry back into the past where they belong.  They didn’t disappear, but they took their rightful spot on a shelf, packed securely away in a box labeled “No Longer Needed”.

I let them go, and they didn’t stay.