I like to think there is a stage in your mind and you, your consciousness, are sitting out in the front row with some spectacles and a notebook as all your thoughts that come and go constantly audition on the stage. To become part of your life in some way. Some of them are terrible, you dismiss them immediately. Others put on such an immersive display that you lose yourself in them for a while, caught up in the raw emotion of their act.

It’s important that you pull back to recognize: it’s you who calls the shots. You determine who and what gets a part in the show, in your life. You are not simply an embodiment of thoughts. You are the Big Director. An intelligent and capable observer who can decide what becomes of those auditionees on the stage. You can embrace them, laugh at them, drop them, or replace them someday when the time comes. They are no more a part of you than you allow them to be.

We look at animals in the wild,
watch them segregate into packs
and eat their young.
Watch them spill blood for land, for resources,
trapped in their primal race for dominance and survival.

We look on at the cut throat nature of
their lives and tell ourselves,
“Poor beasts,”
“it’s all they know.”
Slaves to instinct,
bereft of the higher thought that could
free them from their painful cycle.

What’s our excuse?
What good is consciousness,
the ability to reason if we relentlessly choose not to?
If our eyes stare, too, hungry
out into the wood.

We are not the people we imagine ourselves to be. We are who we actively work to become

Some think themselves prisoners
alone and cold in a cage from between whose bars
the light around them does not filter through.

They place their freedom in the upturned palms of lovers
keys folded into their warm hands
“You save me,” they say, “every day from this wretched place inside myself
and if you leave, I will be trapped there again.
Please don’t ever leave.”

But the hands of lovers are not keys,
they’re our inspiration. Our call to action
and our bodies are not a cage
and our minds are not a prison
and the only person that can pull us from the sinkholes that we build inside ourselves,
is ourselves.

Emotions and trauma tend to hang around in your head. Sometimes as clear images. As memories, as stories and as songs. Other times they are an undefined cloud. A mental fog in your consciousness that you can’t quite place your finger on, but you feel it there, weighing down some part of you somewhere. And as easy as it is to adapt around this, to turn your attention elsewhere and tell yourself that you are getting on with your life you must know that if ignored, it will worsen. It will collect, and collect, until it is so swollen it will have no choice but to pour. Please, let it drizzle here and there. Use it to water your thoughts and let it thin out to give the sun a chance to get through.

Don’t look the other way, don’t let it become a devastating storm.

We cannot look at the wrongs people have done to us as debts,
or we will always feel they owe us something.
We won’t be able to see any good they bring,
no matter how small, beneath the eternal shadow of those dues.

Whatever thing they have done has
left a hole that cannot be filled with gestures, money or things.
What people don’t tell you
is that these feed the hole,
make it bigger and hungrier inside you.

No one can make something that’s happened, unhappen.
We can only choose whether to forgive,
and they can only, slowly, try to replace
the memories we have of them with better ones, if we let them.
Only if we choose to let them.

So if you choose to let them,
do not think of it as repayment, as something you are owed.
Tell them instead why you have forgiven them, what that means to you.
Tell them about the hole and how it hurts, and maybe, they won’t disappoint you.

Maybe they can grow to fill your life with
something that may otherwise have been missing.
Maybe their words and their growth
can help make the hole feel smaller,
over time.

Or maybe they’re not ready.
Maybe neither of you ever will be and if that’s the case, you must be ready to let them go.
For both of you to wind along separate paths, farther and farther apart.
Until the echoes of their voice in your memory are so distant
that you question whether the sound you hear when you think of them,
even still resembles their voice at all.