Life As A Woven Rope

"It's hard to accept, but you can't change the past.  You can't go back and manipulate things to the way you wanted them to happen.  Because life'd be meaningless and boring and just not worth living.  But you can change the future and that's a beautiful thing about life. yes, you will make mistakes.  And yes, you will have bad days - but as long as you let the past go, you'll have such a gorgeous and bright future ahead of you.  Knowing that things were meant to happen.  Knowing that each day you will learn something so that you keep growing to be a better person.  Life is like a rope, twined in all it's complexities and yet weaved into one marvelous stream that you have the chance to use something amazing from.  So grab hold of it."

I've been writing about the past a lot because that's a huge issue with me. My past is a mixed one, as are many people's are. I had a rough go of it around the beginning of college and then things started looking up, then things were really good and then it started to get rough again. And then my accident happened. I look back on the part of my past that was rough in the beginning and I'm settled with it, I'm OK with things that happened. And then I look back at the part of my past that was great, when I was living in Portland, OR for awhile and then when I made the biggest choice of my life - moving to New York. My time there for the first 2.5 years are what I can't let go of because they were incredible. I dreamed of moving to New York someday and working to make my dreams come true as an actress and I was on my way when things started to get rough again and I needed to come home to get my head on straight. And that's when my accident happened. I'd only been home about a week or so when I was injured and my life changed forever.




It's so very hard to accept that I can't change the past. I can't change the rough times towards the end of my time in New York that led to my downfall and I can't change the events that led to my injury. But I certainly cannot accept those things yet. I just can't. And I can't forgive myself. I don't think I ever will either, accept and forgive. A burn injury is devastating, not that I'm taking away from any other injury, I'm just speaking from personal experience and from what doctors have spoken of burn injuries. A burn injury can take away who you are, your confidence, your own body, your dreams. A burn injury is a life long process to fix and reconstruct. I don't think it will ever really be over for me, and I'm not just talking surgeries. I'm talking about acceptance of my new scarred body, my confidence, knowing who I am anymore, and destruction of my dreams. The first and last parts I mentioned are the toughest for me and probably the ones I will never be at peace with.




So the quotes says that even though I can't go back and manipulate the past, I can change the future. That's another problem for me. I didn't want to change my future. I wanted to be an actress, a well respected and oscar-winning actress. The best of my generation to come along in theater and film. But now that may never come to be because of the change in my appearance. And that destroys me everyday, like the yearly whipping in The Count of Monte Christo except instead of a yearly whipping, it's everyday. Everyday I endure the torture of that possible loss. My "back up dream", if you will, was to be in the BSU in the FBI (it's actually called the BSU as opposed to the BAU in the series Criminal Minds) and work as a criminal profiler, work crime scenes and work the mind of the killer to catch them. I'm fascinated by that stuff. And this was way before I got into Criminal Minds so it's not because of some fantasy based on a TV series. But even that dream may not be possible because I've researched it and you have to pass a serious physical test and with my limited mobility there's no way I'd pass. Unless by some miracle, with my reconstruction I got enough mobility to get through it. So it's almost like two dreams were destroyed with my injury. It's hard enough for your ultimate dream but for a second to be destroyed along with it, too?




The analogy of the rope is beautiful, I think. Your life is woven together with successes and failures, mistakes and regrets, happy and sad moments but ultimately it is what makes up your life and what develops who you are and your character. That all those things together make up something amazing that you should want to grab ahold of and keep climbing to the top, wherever it may lead you.