Certain things, people and acts leave a scar that we carry through our lives… a bleeding scar. They cut deep through the softest flesh of our insecurity, they smash the strongest armature of our self-confidence with a mallet, set fire to all our suspicions dormant up to that moment. Once they are done, they say they did not do it on purpose, they turn their back on you and leave. And we, hobbling, broken and burnt, step into the future dragging all that emotional baggage, which more often than not gets heavier faster than it takes us to heal, so there comes a moment when we start tripping over it.
Wounded, we start sticking the knife into the innocent, so scared that we scare the brave to death, all the time consumed by a serious illness that is called self-pity. We do not see a way out of the dark, we grope and stumble, usually making the wrong choice. We talk about a broken heart without knowing at that moment that it heals much faster than our hurt ego. It is an optical illusion when, blinded by anguish, we mistake our heart for our ego and become prisoners trying to cure the incurable for years, prisoners of our bitter, greatest enemy – our own ego.
Our ego should not be mollycoddled, pandered to or comforted. As soon as it starts whining from hunger it should not be fed, but smothered with a pillow, nipped in the bud. If you fail to do it then, being uncastrated and potent, it starts to procreate with our vanity and they, like vermin, churn out on a daily basis little ego trips that we, disoriented, suffocate everyone with. There is nothing like an enemy from the past to inflict more pain than your own ego in the present.
It is all very simple. There is no way you can stop days rolling forward, or make the future go backward, so we are somehow genetically wired to overcome our past naturally, either knowing how to do it or not. It is an undeniable truth, which we could not deny and even if we did, we would end up with burn blisters on our palate. That is why all those deceased, false kisses that taught us how to kiss more passionately, all those sweet lies that we swallowed that taught us how to spit out the truth more crudely, those evil fates brushing their itchy groins against that little love of ours, those unfinished tales that made no sense even from the outset, and all those extras not playing any role in our lives, we should let go of.
And when we do, we should learn how to love them and be grateful to them. There comes a day when the school of life makes us remember them the way bad students remember things they swot for the exam they have to sit again. That is the time to take out of our school bag all the mistakes, fears and pain we carried in it, like stones that hampered us from moving forward. Then we will be ready, resurrected from our own fears and our buried ego, and wiser than before, to hurtle into the embrace of new opportunities, to give our heart to new people and repeat the same things with them, knowing those things were not wrong but our assessment of the people we wanted them with in the past was.
Translated from the Serbian by Svetlana Milivojević-Petrović
Share:
Ovaj post je dostupan i na: Serbian
