A couple years ago I was watching a BBC Victorian romance (because I am and always have been absolutely obsessed with that shit. It’s like crack.), and there was a quote that punched me in the face. I had to pause and go back and replay it so I could write it down in one of my little notebooks I have laying around the house to capture life’s little golden ticket moments such as this one. The movie was called The Go-Between (2015), based on the novel written by L. P. Hartley published in 1953. While I’m not sure if all of it is actually from the book, here is the quote that hit me, “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there… I’ve spent a good part of my life running away from that country, keeping it’s painful secrets locked away, buried deep. I’ve been a foreigner in a world of emotion, ignorant of its language. The truth is, I’ve been too afraid to live.” Well sweet holy mother of goodness… Thank you, L. P. Hartley and/or BBC for illustrating so eloquently the way I felt about the past for the majority of my life.

Now had I watched the earlier version of this movie or read the book prior to getting sober and doing some work around the treacherous jungle that is my past, I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about that quote. I probably would have been to inebriated to really notice it at all and I certainly wouldn’t have been able to write it down in one of my many little notebooks. Wait, I didn’t even have notebooks around the house at all back then… I was so rarely inspired by anything in my drinking days…

Anyway, back to the quote with the golden gloves! Jump forward to today, after being reminded of this quote while flipping through my little notebook, it hit me again because I realized that it was the work I’ve done on myself that allowed me to appreciate that quote at all. Today, I can fully understand how hard it is for so many of us to even consider unlocking those secrets we’ve buried away, let alone begin to translate the emotions we felt back then! But we need to be able to unpack that baggage and see what was happening at that point in our lives from this new perspective that time and experience has granted us. By letting that shit out in the open, we can begin to forgive ourselves for being ignorant of that emotional language that would have helped us process all that bullshit.

We spend our lives fearing our own emotions because we don’t know how to decipher those feelings for our own understanding, let alone attempt to relay those emotions to another human being. So yup, we fear exchanging emotion with others too! We don’t understand ourselves, so we feel that others won’t understand us either, and on and on that dysfunctional wheel turns until the whole vehicle that is your life hits a wall. Until we do something to change the way we process things, the way we talk about things, the way we feel things, we just keep going through life afraid. I know, I know, feelings, yuck! They’re messy, but the more we deal with those little bastards, the better we get at it, just like everything else!

You want to keep being fucked up about the past, okay, but you don’t need to be. You can learn the language. You can let all those feels out of the box you got ’em locked up in so that you can face them, see them for the overrated boogiemen that they are, and you can let those bitches go! Don’t let that old shit keep you trapped in fear! Have the courage face that shit, so you can live without fear of what you might feel. You might actually learn to appreciate your feelings and permit yourself to experience the whole spectrum of human emotion. You might even like it… Give it a try. I dare ya. XO.

(Photo: My “let go” tattoo I got in 2014, when I was around 9 months sober.)