Pictures Always Capture...

The memories we seem to forget...

Today, for whatever random reason I had, I was going through old photo albums on my computer. As time passed, I started looking for pictures of myself: me smiling, me feeling sexy, anything. I noticed that there weren't as many photos in recent years as I would like to have believed; that really, anything after, maybe, early 2016 didn't carry as many photos as one album in particular did. Turns out, all of 2015 into 2016 carried the absolute most of those pictures.

Seems to me that all of 2015 into 2016, I was the happiest that I had ever been in my life. The most confident as well. This album was full of smiling selfies and images where I thought I looked cute or even sexy on various occasions; but it was the smiling selfies that got to me. These smiling selfies were genuine smiles; smiles that reached my eyes, smiles that didn't seem forced or struggled for.

In recent years, I very rarely take selfies anymore. Any time that I do, I can see the forced smile on my face in the image and I delete it. I no longer have that air of confidence about myself that I once had; I know because I can feel it. I can feel the way that I withdraw into myself or how the very confidence I once held is slowly slipping away from me.

Multiple events have happened in my life since early 2016 that I know have played a major role in the way things were and the way things are now. Some, or even very few, of those events were well within my control while others were a forced upon me in a manner that has almost caused my demise. It is those moments that have changed me. Those moments that have left my inner core seething just beneath the surface the way blood courses just  beneath our skin. I know what has changed me and I loath it, hate it almost, and that is what I find most dangerous.

I am in a mental battle of trying to grow as an individual while still trying to accept that there is a part of me that refuses to let go of the growing disgust within myself about choices that I could have made involving those events. And understand, it is not as if theses events happened and that was the end of it. Oh no, that is not the case at all. These events have made me feel trapped within my own mind, within my own life. They have snowballed downhill on the same course to where they have merged together and become this grand monster that has taken on a life of its own. So much so, dare I call it a cancer?

However, after looking at those albums from the past and realizing that I have a present and a future, I can no longer allow myself to be the way that I have become. I cannot simply allow myself to continue to slip away nor can I accept that who I used to be is forever gone. There is someone that I am trying to become and in order for me to become this person, in order for me to continue to actually grow, I have to eradicate this monster immediately and I have to do so with everything in me because only then, will I be able to truly smile again...