Purging What No Longer Serves You

“My Grandmother doesn’t love me! You think I give a fuck about how you feel?”

I literally said that to someone, and I meant it! I was convinced that my grandmother didn’t love me. I eventually realized that before I came to that conclusion, I didn’t really have much love for myself. I self-esteem was at an all time low and my levels of depression was soaring to unimaginable heights. I spent YEARS feeling this way, and it manifested into some horrible situations.

It became my mantra. It was a painful mantra too. What kind of person is hated by their grandmother? What breed of monster did I have to be for that to happen? In turn, when I encountered other people who didn’t love me, respect me, honor me, so on and so forth, it just felt normal. Of course, they don’t care about me. Why would they? No one else does.

Then one day, I said it to someone jokingly. We even shared a laughed behind it, and in that moment I felt empowered. Even without my grandmother’s love, or the love of my entire paternal family for that matter, I was blessed. I wasn’t perfect, just blessed. Could it be that I needed to lose everything I deemed so sacred to build a relationship with the faith that would carry me through it all? I needed to be ripped away from them to get closer to Him.

I feel my past experiences have made me more comfortable with the purge. My emotional healing has even been questioned by someone I purged from my life. The real question is why would I work so hard to heal just to return to what is still broken?

When we decide a situation is dangerous or unsafe, we avoid it. When we find a person is untrustworthy or disloyal, we remove them from our lives. If we don’t like the way the food taste at a restaurant, we stop going! We purge it. So why would we realize something is toxic to our lives, and not purge it? Or even better, remove it, heal from it, and go back to it?

Sometimes purging is literally getting rid of something. In other cases, it’s setting boundaries. It means saying no – without guilt. It’s refusing to enable someone’s negative behaviors. It’s refusing to let someone treat you differently than they would allow you to treat them (psst…that’s disrespect). It’s eliminating broken patterns, behaviors, and cycles.

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It can be a hard thing to do. You are stepping out of your comfort zone and doing something unfamiliar. You could even question if it’s the right thing to do. You feel like your leaving everything you know behind. You are abandoning ideologies that define who you are and have carried you this far in life. Is that a smart thing to do? If you don’t like where you are, then yes, it is a smart thing to do. If you want something different you have to do something different.

If you’re doing the work and you’re healing yourself, you’ve already purged some things. It’s a part of the process. Don’t feel guilty or ashamed. It’s needed for your growth. You are becoming a better person, and this will only benefit you and everyone around you.

It would be absurd to believe that you are the only broken person in your circle, just as it would be absurd to think that you surrounded yourself with broken people, but you are not broken as well. Broken doesn’t mean bad. It just indicates that some areas need repair to function the way you desire. Either way, you need to focus on your healing and that requires leaving behind what is still broken.

Broken people usually don’t have much empathy, so they certainly won’t have any empathy for you right now. As you are purging and healing, take inventory. Broken people are usually more concerned with how they are affected. How has your distance affected them? How has your new life affected them? How does all this make them feel? They don’t take any time or energy to understand your needs. They probably don’t care.

The solution would sound simple. If they are not pleased with the new and healed you, couldn’t they just move on as well? Of course they could! They won’t though. They are broken. Remember how the broken you felt? You felt like you didn’t deserve much. You tolerated so much from people. You felt stuck. That’s where they are. They have no faith that they too can heal so it would just be easier to keep you broken. They will not let you go easily and you must get comfortable with fighting for yourself.

Purging what no longer serves you is not easy, it’s just necessary. It frees space, time and energy. You will need the vitality and passion to create your amazing new life.

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