Poking Wounds

I have a folder of emails that I keep buried in my in-box.  They are a sort of miserable greatest hits of the last eighteen months or so.  When the great schism happened, I went through and deleted 95% of the vast store of emails, text messages, and chats that I had collected over about 6 months.  If there was one thing we did a lot of, it was TALK.  Good gracious there was a bunch of it!  And maybe it's the teacher in me that led me to hang on to them.  I'm used to collecting artifacts and work samples to document everything.  For whatever reason, I kept a sample from the beginning, the middle, and the end.

These messages were all brutal to read.  The beginning ones - because they were so sweet and tender, so full of promises and hope.  The middle ones - because they clearly showed the fault lines that and signaled the descent that would end in flames and burning.  But the ending ones - the ending ones were hardest because they captured the immensity of the anger and hurt that eventually led to the final break.

Despite the fact that these were brutally painful to read, I had made a habit of revisiting them over the course of the last year.  Sometimes, it was because I was feeling nostalgic and needed a dose of reality.  Sometimes because I was feeling sorry for myself, and I wanted to fan the flames of my pity party bonfire.  Sometimes, it was a reminder of how far I've come from that point.  As the year progressed, I would use the hurt they generated as a measure.  Much like doctor may palpate a wounded area to see if it's healing properly, I would poke at my wounds by re-reading these messages.  I told myself it was to measure my progress -  to see how much it still hurt my heart, but I think there was some self-punishment at work there too.  Regardless of the reason, the effect was consistent.  Almost without fail, just opening the folder would bring on a wave of anxiety, anger, hurt and sometimes tears.  I would feel my face flush and get the feeling that the world was falling out from under me.

In the early days and weeks, I probed frequently.  I read and re-read them, forcing myself to feel every bit of it.  However, I found that poking at a wound too much hindered its healing, so as time went on, I revisited them less and less.

I stumbled upon this folder today while looking for something else.  I had honestly forgotten it was there.  In fact, it took me a minute to realize what was in the folder I had named "Brain Dump."  When I opened it and saw the index, I expected the flush, the anxiety, the hurt, the anger, the tears.  Instead, I got... nothing.  I opened one of the messages, and read over it.  I noted how overwrought our words had been - how loaded and angry - but the emotional wallop that usually came with remembering them was gone.

Could this really be the case?

I pulled up the worst one of the bunch. It was the howler that I could only bring myself to read a handful of times - so full of venom that I hated to even think about it.  There was a time when those words cut me so deeply that I could barely stand it.  No one had ever spoken of me - before or since - in such a harsh and hateful way, and at the time, it had cut me to the core. I trotted that one out when I was feeling particularly self-flagellating, and it had never failed to deliver.

Today, I didn't feel the need to even open it.  I knew that the things in it were not true, knew that the person who wrote it knew nothing about me - not really.  I also knew that the words contained in that email were so far removed from my my life as it is now that it was no longer a reliable artifact.  I had learned all I could from this experience.  I didn't have to keep poking.  The pain was gone.  It was time to let the rest of it go too.

I deleted the folder.