I Am Slowly Forgetting How Bad My Baggage Used To Be

I am slowly healing. I am slowly growing away from the roots of the person I used to be — a person who doubted herself, who expected the worst from everyone, who was too scared to put herself out there.

Lately, I am distributing more of my trust. I am letting others inch closer. I have turned the brick wall around my heart into a chainlink fence I can look through and wriggle my fingers through. I am allowing select people inside, but only after they have earned the right.

I am slowly forgetting how bad my baggage used to be after all of my heartbreaks. I am distancing myself from my demons. I am allowing myself to form relationships with worthwhile people, even though there is a chance they are going to leave me, hurt me, break me.

I am slowly learning to stop letting the bad things that happened in my past scare me away from creating a better future for myself. I am not going to mourn my exes forever. I am not going to continue missing people who have stopped missing me a long time ago. I am not going to put myself through pain for an extended amount of time because I have already spent enough time suffering.

I am slowly learning to look at love with a fresh pair of eyes. I am not going to blame someone else for the mistakes a past lover made. I am not going to let a bad experience with an almost turn me away from the idea of dating. I am not going to stay single in order to spite someone from my past because that is only giving them what they want.

I am slowly training myself to forget about all of the bad things that have happened to me before and focus on the good things awaiting me in the future. I am trying to remind myself relationships are worth the risk as long as the right person is involved. As long as I think things through before making a commitment.

I am slowly forgetting why I wanted to stay single in the first place. I am slowly remembering how good it feels to be wanted by someone else, to be comforted by someone else, to belong to someone else.

I am slowly learning to break away from my comfort zone, to move forward, to keep my eyes ahead of me. That does not mean my past is completely irrelevant. The past still bothers me from time to time. The past has shaped me into the insecure, unsure person I am today, but I have been learning to reshape myself. I have been learning to stop letting the ghosts of people who abandoned me convince me to walk away from real, living people who are trying to get closer to me.

I am not going to let my baggage weigh me down forever. I am working on shaking it from my grasp and leaving it far, far behind me.