A Self-love Story

Chapter 14

I am better off healed than I ever was unbroken.   ~Beth Moore

Dear diary,

Today I visited the cemetery. I went to see my mother and my brother and in a sense to tell them goodbye. And no, I'm not going to commit suicide or anything and neither am I leaving this place. I'm going to tell them goodbye on behalf of the old Tia. This is the last day that I'm going to allow myself to cling to my past. After today I'm going to go on a journey (figuratively, of course) to find out who I am now. I think my past will always be a part of me, but I'm not going to let it affect me wholly any more. How it has already affected me, hurt me, makes me who I am now, but if I allow it to hurt me any more, the pain that will follow will be completely self-inflicted. And I decided that I will not hurt myself or allow myself to be hurt anymore.

I had put my fingers in the soil and pulled out small clumps of it. I'd only managed to make a small hole but that was enough for what I needed to bury in there.

Mom, Kier, I don't want to mourn your deaths anymore. This doesn't mean that I don't love you guys anymore or that I no longer have a mother and brother shaped hole in my heart. This simply means that I'm choosing to live. I'm choosing to live regardless of all the sorrow threatening to pull me down to the depths of the hell my mind can conjure. I will always remember you and not one day will go by when I won't miss your presence, but today is the day I'm moving on. From today I'll honour your memories by thinking of you with nothing but happiness. I am on my very own pursuit of happiness and I choose to believe that wherever you are, you are happy too.

Goodbye, mom and Kier and I'll see you on the other side.

That is the letter I buried just next to their graves telling them the reason for what I was about to do.

Pink carnations were clutched in my hand, the flowers symbolising death and the remembrance of the deceased. With the scent of the carnations in my nose, the sight of my mother's and brother's grey tombstones, the texture of the cool soil on my fingertips and the sound of soft sobbing in the distance, I finally bid goodbye to the deceased, promising never to forget them. And I wasn't just referring to my mother and my brother, I was also referring to my old self. I bid her goodbye because she is dead. This is the fact that took me three long years to accept, but now that I have come to terms with it, I can hear the whooshing sound of the gates of freedom being thrown open in my mind and my heart.

I always kept comparing myself to that Tia. I constantly tried to revert back to being her, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously. And I placed so many expectations on myself that I was constantly disappointing myself. Now, I have accepted the fact that she is dead and will never be returning and so I'm so much...freer. I hadn't realised that the walls that I had felt constantly closing in around me were of my own making. I didn't realise that I held the key to the chains wrapped tightly around my heart. But I know now and I'm never going to trap myself again.

I had placed the flowers down when the chilly breeze that caused gooseflesh to pebble my skin also seemed to snatch away the worries weighing on me. When I walked out of the cemetery I felt like a new person. The trauma that I faced nearly broke me but in surviving it, I had been reborn into a new person, a stronger person. I never thought this would happen, but the regret I felt about the accident happening is slowly ebbing like a wave receding from the shore. I know that some days it might rise like the high tide but I also know that it will always eventually recede if I let it.

Today I visited all the people that held important places in the old Tia's life. Because I wanted to go there and say goodbye on her behalf. I wanted to tell them and myself that she'll never come back to those places again because she is gone.