There was one thing that I regretted a lot for the past 3 years, which was that I deleted an iMessage thread that meant a lot to me in the past. I wanted a fresh start, so I deleted a lot of memories along with it. I was hurting a lot with the memories in the iMessage thread because reading them would online remind me what I lost, so I decided to delete the thread. And after I deleted it, I had regretted it ever since. I tried to reload it on my computer, logging into my iPad and then my Mac to get those messages back. But they never came back and I just accepted that they were lost forever. I guess I could remember some of the messages in my head.
I got my new Macbook Pro on Tuesday, the day after my birthday. I needed it because I needed to install Spyder on my Mac lol. It’s for the AI course I am doing now. Anyway, I thought I’d test everything on my Mac, so I logged into iMessage. Then what do you know, the message thread from 2022 popped back - like it was never deleted. It was just hidden somewhere. Curiosity got the best of me, so I opened it up to read some old messages. But then I started cringing at myself. I was really unsure and insecure. So I closed the thread.
But then I felt I wanted to read it again tonight and found some old messages we shared. I realised we were just as insecure as each other. A long distance thing was never easy. It really plays on you. And there I just saw, two people trying their best in a circumstance that they didn’t really choose despite the feelings they had for each other. And when you have two people trying their best, when they both are dealing with their insecurities, it definitely wears them out. It’s a dynamic that pushes and pulls. I look back at these two people, one of them is old me, and I think we were just trying to figure things out and wanting certainty, in a world of uncertain things.
Reading these texts has winded me a little. Maybe it’s just the rest of the feelings that I have surpressed wanting to come out. That’s what I have been doing lately - I’ve just been processing my feelings, allowing myself to be a human and to have feelings about it. I decided I no longer wanted to suppress my feelings about things, because what you resists persists. So I have allowed myself to feel sad and just been there for myself whenever I have an emotion come up. I had been processing a lot more than usual, that I didn’t feel like I woke up with the same ache as I did in the past. But seeing those texts got me feeling overwhelmed. And I had resisted reading them again, because I was afraid of the crushing feeling. But then I just did it anyway, confronting my fear about my pain. I felt the pain in my chest and felt the feelings of what I was reading was history. I wrote it, so did he. But when I could be ok with these feelings, I could feel them wanting to leave me and rather than pain, it felt like, relief. I really held onto these emotions for a long time because I couldn’t bring myself to face them. And I am doing it because I need to be there for myself, like I would do the same for a friend, should they be in pain. I remember some texts - some really lovely, some really crushing. I felt all the same emotions as I did when I first got them. And facing the crushing feeling head on, that feeling of it being over, was at first crushing. But it was just that, a feeling. And then I felt better, a little bit proud of myself. Like I was able to face my fear and I didn’t die. Maybe that’s why fear exists, cause the body thinks its going to die. But we didn’t die! And there was a feeling of ‘hey, that wasn’t so bad’. And when you do more of that, you start becoming less fearful and more fearless.
There’s a part of me that feels like I am back in those messages and the emotions are quite intense when I am there. But then I remember, I am here, now. I orientated myself, looking at Elliot and reminded myself that I am here, right now. Those texts, they were from 6 - 8 years ago but I live here, in the present. And I am okay. I just buried these feelings deep within somewhere so deep because I was always running away from them. But I stopped doing that and opened that box I have been trying so hard to close. But the box was always screaming to be opened. And here, I have opened the pandora’s box. It’s like the dementors in HP - no longer fighting them, but setting them free.
I think the reason why I deleted the message thread back in 2022 was because it hurt too much. I didn’t want to scroll back to the messages and just see history. I didn’t want to see the slow unwinding of our situation. I knew I would be tempted to go back to read between the lines to see what went wrong and what I potentially missed. So I ran away from these feelings and now I am finally courageous enough to face them. I think what has changed is because I no longer want to be defined by these feelings. I don’t want my pain to haunt me anymore. I want to see it for what these memories were, a really beautiful part of my life that I will always treasure. There is a part of me that still hurts and my heart is so scared that I will never experience these feelings again. But even though I haven’t I have still lived a life since then and I’m still alive. Maybe that’s what I want to do - I just want to transmute the pain, so I can feel something better. It’s like the Japanese concept Kintsugi - when somethings broken, you don’t go and throw it away. But instead, you fix it and mend it with gold.