painful memories - quotes and descriptions to inspire creative writing

The smell of the drains was a Gollum hand, reaching up my nose to rattle my brain. It was as if its fingertips had made craters in my grey-matter, bruising it for no other reason than a cold and petty thrill. How could it? Foul though was, it’s just a stink. Somewhere, behind the closed and double-locked doors of my memories, a darkness stirred. PTSD erased my memories, but whatever happened, it stank this same way.

I went back to where it happened. I wanted to take away the power of the painful memory for hurt, prove to myself that I could choose to move on. So I took the one I love the most, my best friend, and on that spot we made a great memory, a happy one. Now when my brain goes back there I divert it only to the good memory, the healing one. It's as if I wrote a good story over the top of a bad story, and in time the ink of the bad story fades away until only the good one remains.

"Yeah, I know he's in pain. So much so obvious. But those old scars are best left alone unless you've got the time to stick by him, to heal him after you've opened them up. I know it seems kind to ask and enquire, but in this situation it isn't. Every one of those scars is some terrible pain, that's why we do our best to accept people as they are and be compassionate. So that surface conversation we just had, it wasn't much, but it was something and actually the right balance in the moment."

Those painful memories are books with chapters, deep and horrible; and so I leave them on the shelf to gather dust. I can pick them up if I need to learn something, to gain a perspective that helps me to create my own good story. I can use them to re-see situations through the lens of their needs and traumas rather than mine. I want today, tomorrow and every tomorrow after to be wonderful; I want to choose what to write on those blank pages.

Your suffering, your memory of it, is like a teddybear fashioned from glass shards - the tighter you cling to it the deeper it will cut. So perhaps practice putting it down for longer periods of time, noticing when you have picked it up and it slices at your skin. You and it are separate. One day you'll notice that the bad teddybear is gone, you lost it sometime and never noticed. You will see that your good and noble choices made a better life, something positive, and now you hold a new teddybear, soft and warm, one that brings an inner glow and keeps you cosy under starlight and sunshine alike.

These painful memories, they're just the same as nightmares. They vanish when I'm awake, when I'm really right here in the present moment with you. Once I really open my eyes, let in daylight, they have no choice but to leave and I can let in all the wonderful things around me.

I take my painful memories and place them in a box; I put them there with photographs, rings and cufflinks. The box is their coffin and I set them to rest with the same reverence as a beloved one passed on. This funeral comes with tears and trauma no less than a real death and now that they have been buried, the wake comes next. It is the waking of my inner-self, the one with the power to heal and be the person I was always destined to be.

If a bad memory is like a bird, it is okay to know it is sitting on a branch nearby. It is okay to notice it fly and sing. Yet move in calmness with eyes only for the nature around you, with skin that feels the wind and eyes that open for the light. When your mind naturally moves back into the present, into the moment that is the gift of life, the bird will be gone.