When you reflect on your past, how do you feel? More importantly, how can you overcome how you feel about your past?
As I child, other children laughed at me because of my clothes. My hand-me-down pants were too short, as were the sleeves of my shirt. Both my pants and my shirts usually had permanent stains. The other children had nicer clothes than me. And children can be the cruelest people. When I reflect on the past, I recall my peers laughing at me for things that were not my fault.
As a child, my shoes often were too small. My feet usually hurt so badly that I did not run around on the playground with the other children. I only ran around when I could kick my shoes off and run barefoot. When I reflect on my past, I cannot forget the pain in my feet.
As a child, my home was not a loving place. It was a small building filled with arguments and yelling. To use the words of my deceased brother, the tension in the air of my childhood home was “so thick you could easily cut it into bricks.” In my childhood home, I did not feel loved and wanted. When I reflect on the past, I distinctly remember fear inhibiting me from expressing my true feelings.
As a child, I often lacked food. When Mother went to work one day, she left a pot of “leftover stew” on the stove. She had opened the refrigerator and dumped every left over into the pot, turned the heat on low and stirred it, and told us to eat it for dinner. But it smelled so badly that we could not even take a single bite of it. In spite of our hunger, we dumped it on our Mother’s favorite bush, and that bush died the next day. Although we remained hungry, it was good that we dumped our “dinner” on a bush instead of eating it! Now as I reflect on my past, I laugh about this unfortunate dead bush, although at the time it was not funny.
As a child, people outside my family showed me love in numerous ways. One woman paid me money to read the Bible to her. My Grandmother loved me in every way that my Mother did not. My teachers in school seemed to truly enjoy teaching me and helped me every way they could. And my Sunday School teacher always made me feel like the luckiest child in the world. When I reflect on the past, I am grateful for my mentors who loved me unconditionally.
Now, as an adult, I look back on my childhood and realize how enriched my childhood was. The love that others gave me enriched me beyond measure. Their love motivated me to work hard and succeed. It also gave me reasons to keep going on numerous days when I wanted to give up.
Now, as an adult, I try every day to enrich the lives of others instead of dwelling on my past. Since each person in the world is unique and different, each person’s life should be enriched in a different way. First, I figure out how to improve someone’s life, then I do my best to enable him or her to turn the corner and move on.
If, like myself, you had a difficult childhood, do you know how to truly conquer the feelings your childhood left in your heart? You cannot buy yourself enough material possessions to amend the leftovers from your past, because all the possessions in the world would not do this. Nor can you drink enough alcohol, take enough drugs, or smoke enough cigarettes to overcome it. Consuming drugs and alcohol and cigarettes will only create more problems.
Whenever reflecting on your past causes you to feel angst, remember this. You cannot change your past, but you can change how you feel about yourself. Treat people the way you wish others had treated you in the past, and cherish the love that your actions reflect back to you.
Trust me, this is the best way to overcome your past!
Let the encouraging words in these bobbiejrae posts help you
soar like an eagle above life’s storms.
Even when you feel very sad…
You can survive without developing bad habits.
Remember–what others have done to you is not your fault!
I wrote this post to do one thing–to keep an important promise I made.
View Comments (1)
Well said