Still, the backbone to my sense of humor lies in the suffering I've been through. I mean, what I've been through has been nothing short of horrendous and cruel. My past is nauseating, quite literally. But, it's a past I must learn to accept if I am to heal. Humor helps to defang it tremendously, thus making it easier for me to accept my past and finally begin to truly heal. 

Logically, I know accepting my past doesn't mean becoming okay with it. It just means I'm ready to heal from it; to actually stitch up the bullet wounds instead of continuously putting band-aids on them. The scars of my past will forever be with me, figuratively and literally. I will never be okay with my past, and I will always be negatively impacted by it in some ways, even if I accept it and heal. I will forever view my past as the horrific tragedy it was, make fun of it to stay afloat during harder times, and I will always argue with God over it. Luckily for me, that's perfectly okay. It's actually a pretty normal reaction if you ask me. And, God can handle it (no matter what the fundamentalists say). 

Dealing with my past is getting much easier as time goes on, especially with the help of a therapist who actually knows a thing or two of what she's doing. The more I work through decades of unprocessed trauma, the less fearful and anxious I become. The less "small" I feel. Dare I say, the more I look back on my past and work through it in therapy and in my writing, the more willing I am to remember it. The less I beg to forget it. 

It's not that I want to forget my past. I just want to stop re-living it every damn day. I don't want pictures of my newborn self to make me so upset. I don't want stinging chills to shoot up and down my spine every time I have to go into the hospital for a regular check-up. I don't want to be afraid of letting people into my life out of fear of them rejecting me because of my conditions. I don't want to feel compelled to hide my scars from the world, out of fear of being asked about them and having to relive my past to explain them. Overall, I just don't want to live in fear anymore. I want to be free from my past, but I don't ever want to forget it.

The only way to heal is to work through my emotions in therapy, and in my writing. And accept, learn from, even embrace my past, instead of trying to run from it.