          Lately I’ve been trying to learn how to forgive myself. This is probably one of the hardest parts of my divorce journey and will most likely take the most time. I know that people say hindsight is 20/20. They always say you shouldn’t judge the person you were years ago. Hell, even I always say you shouldn’t judge yesterday’s self with today’s wisdom. I even wrote a post about that subject years ago ( Judging Yesterday’s Self with Today’s Wisdom.). However, I guess it feels different because all the warning signs are coming back to me. I may have been young and dumb, with a certain high level of optimism, but I should’ve known better. It’s like I saw what I wanted to see, and I gave too much time to it. Time is so precious, it’s the one thing we can’t afford to waste. It’s just so hard not to be upset with myself after looking back, reflecting and reading a lot of journal entries.
I will say that I’ve learned A LOT from this situation. I wish I could go back in time and share all my newfound wisdom with my younger self. I wish I could tell her to trust her gut, and to always make sure that she feels emotionally safe and protected by whomever she agrees to share her life with. I wish I could share everything I’ve learned with her, but now I have to just find a better way to protect myself with the wisdom that I gained as I move forward. I need to take the time to heal and then make better choices in the future. In the end, I can’t blame anyone but myself. Yeah, there may be some things that I didn’t see, but there were still a lot of warning signs that I swept under the rug. I’m afraid that with all the time that I have lost, it will be the cause of me missing out on so many things. Because of my decision, I might miss out on being a mom. By the time I heal or even find it in me to open my heart again, it could be years from now (not to mention the time to date and get to know each other). I wouldn’t want to just jump into motherhood immediately after marriage, so realistically, that feels like at LEAST 5 years. By that time, I probably wouldn’t even want to have children anymore. Every day I try to accept that it’s very possible that I won’t, and I need to forgive myself for it. To be honest, even if I had never got married, I still would never know if I would’ve been a mom. I guess that’s something to hold on to. Maybe my choices didn’t affect that particular area of my life, but that is something I’ll never know for sure.
What I do know is that it might not be too late for other things in life that I wanted, and who knows, maybe what I went through made me more equipped for it. I know this isn’t the end of my story. It’s just the end of the chapter. Or maybe it’s the end of the book, but I’m about to enter the sequel, and there are a lot of sequels (books and movies) that I’ve enjoyed more than the first ones. The original one is usually when the character makes the most mistakes, but the second one is when they’re sharper, wiser and more badass, because they’re no longer moving blindly. They have learned things and gained experience that brings them extra confidence. They develop a greater sense of self and a stronger love for themselves. And that… is what keeps me going!
To anyone going through something similar: May your sequel be better than your prequel, and original! XOXO Thanks for stopping by!
Elle Reyđź“š 