For many years in my life I wrote my misery, pouring it onto the pages of my diaries. All the secrets, pain and frustrations, my entire wounded self crawled into those books; pages upon pages of despair. I never wrote in my happy moments, never recorded the amazing things that happened to me; just my misery. I started writing at 17 and at 40 something I had quite a collection which I stored in a wooden chest with a hefty lock.
I brought the chest to my new country and stored it in the attic. When the first spring in my new house came, I opened that wooden chest for the first time in years, removed all the diaries and built a bonfire in the garden. All those books were burned. I didn’t open any of them, didn’t read one single word. I spent the day in the garden, sick as a dog, burning them books to cinders. In the evening I took a shower, went to bed and slept off my fever.
The next morning as I woke up I felt space; it was as if I was lying under a clear blue sky and I felt free, clear and ready to get on with my life. That bonfire cleansed me; a lifetime of despair literally vanished into thin air, the weight of it finally off my shoulders. So if you are hanging on to old stuff, throw them on the fire and let them go. You are what you hold on to and you are the only one with the power to change that.
