09/12/2025
It took me a little while to realise this one, so I'm sharing it with you because you can potentially lose years of your life if you don't take hold of this, and I say that from having been there myself...
When we go through certain things in life we're faced with a choice of allowing them to make us bitter or better.
I essentially lost everything, and every single aspect of my life was completely destroyed and decimated because I allowed someone into my life who I should never ever have allowed in, in the first place.
There were red flags from the very beginning but I chose to ignore them because I wanted to believe the story I was being told.
I should have been able to trust this person, but they proved how very untrustworthy they were, how unaccountable and how unremorseful they were, and as time has revealed and undeniable evidence has slowly surfaced they quite honestly just didn't have my best interests at heart.
Their presence in my life created a chain reaction that resulted in everything crumbling beneath me from my mental and emotional well-being, my finances, my career, friendships, in the end parts of my physical health, my identity, and my ability to be able to even rebuild and recover from the rubble that remained.
They convinced me that I was the problem, but as soon as they were no longer part of my life the chaos disappeared, things stopped going wrong, I finally felt at peace again, and I realised that their gaslighting of me to make me believe that I was the entire problem was really a distraction from their ever so subtle manipulation and unwillingness to be accountable for any part of it.
I struggled with this for a long time because my mental and emotional well-being suffered severely as a result of them entering my life and so I accepted their blame and their deflection from being accountable, and at one point they even had me convinced that I was a horrible person.
But even as a result of realising the truth later on I still faced a reality of having to somehow pick up all the broken pieces that they had left behind and to try and somehow make something out of it; and the only thing I knew at the time was that no one was coming to save me and that I had to look within to find the answers as to how I was going to do that.
I love the analogy that once something is broken you can never repair it to quite how it was before, but you can pick up all of the broken pieces and create a new work of art in the form of a beautiful mosaic.
We can choose to continue to live in a yesterday that has hurt us and that was so painful to us and continue feeling those feelings, or we can make the decision that even though we may still need more time to heal, that we're not going to let it define who we are, hold us back, or define what our future looks like.
Endings can offer us a clean slate, and closed doors can offer us an opportunity to open another one that has something even better behind it.
You can't go back and change a yesterday, but you can choose to be grateful for what you still have today even if it's only a little.
And you can decide what you want for your future and align your thoughts and actions to that of which you want to create.
Your past does not define you, if anything it adds more depth and character to who you are, so don't stay in a place that you've already outgrown.
Being grateful for what remains and where you can now go is always going to be far more powerful than holding onto the pain of everything that didn't work out...
~ Mark Smith
The Super Powered Mind
