Sweeping It Under The Rug

In these past two weeks I have come to face difficulties in the mirror image of my own self. My inability to face circumstances bit me back with a vengeance. In the past whenever I found myself facing trouble, I would always sweep it under the rug instead of facing it head on. And so, if at this moment you were to lift up the rug, you would find a living and thriving city underneath it. A city where I drew my first breath, learned to write my name in the fog that smears the car window in winters and discovered that the best kept secrets are those you shout out loudly from a cliff over a mountain valley.
One bad experience and I found myself incapable of returning to a city that has made me who I am, turning my back towards all my friends, too afraid to hear out loud the nightmare that I constantly denied to be real. I moved onto a new city and found refuge among strangers, finding comfort within the unfamiliarity of the new places and the people around me.  You might wonder what experience I went through to evoke such a reaction. All I can say is that I had, for the first time, seen the ugly side of a human being and had been hurt enough to lose the ability of trusting myself and those around me. So henceforth I stopped trusting the untrustworthy in order to avoid pain and suffering, my definition of “untrustworthy” being broad enough to encompass anyone within a ten mile radius.
For two years I kept myself bound to this self written contract aimed at avoiding hurt, until two weeks ago when in trying to keep myself away from suffering, I intentionally inflicted the very same suffering upon someone else. I tried to sever a friendship I thought detrimental, not realizing that I would burn both pairs of hands at either end of the rope if I were to set fire to it from the middle.
The days that followed I found myself utterly helpless and in the very pain that I had been trying so hard to keep away, both from the knowledge of what I had done and the lack of it to know what else to do. I could not sweep away the suffering under the rug because it was not mine alone to bare this time.
It was not easy but it hit me one day. After two years of running away, the realization finally hit me. I am not perfect.  As everyone else isn't, I am not either. Imperfection leads to failure and failure is never easy. When you fall, you hurt, especially when the fall is steep. And so hurt is as inevitable as failure. The real strength of character doesn’t lie in the act of avoiding pain and suffering but rather in the attempts of enduring them in order to come to terms with your failings.
I failed twice; two years ago when I laid my trust into the hands of someone who never deserved it and a week ago when I tried to take it away from a person who deserves it all the more. I think it’s time that I come to terms with my failures and my mistakes.  I think it’s time that I return to my city instead of running away from it, and if it comes to it face the person who broke my spirit so badly.
I think it’s about time I grew up.

“So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.”  - J.K Rowling on the " Benefits of Failure"