I miss who I used to be. That gal who was able to love freely, giving her whole heart to someone … or something. Fear took over. Fear of being hurt, betrayed or abandoned.

As a young child, someone who was supposed to love and protect her… well, he didn’t. He stole her innocence.

At sixteen, a college student took advantage of a drunken virgin and stole something precious from her.

At eighteen, the love of her life, her first love, broke her heart into a million pieces when he broke up with her.

A husband and the father of her children stole something far worse… her trust. He cheated and lied more times than she can count.

Then the endless stream of her own bad choices and decisions continued the devastation of her soul.

Each time something traumatic happens to us, a piece of our soul gets left behind in the rubble of the heartbreak. If we don’t have dependable people or mentors in our life when these things take place, then we can falter under the pressure of not knowing how to continue with this new life we are left with.

I was never really taught how to live a productive life. My mother was a survivor of her own heartbreaks, and she taught me how to survive, but not how to live. She passed away awhile back, and ironically, it is because of her death that I have been seeking a new way of living. Her death was the catalyst of this soul searching journey.

What I wouldn’t do to have her here now so we could discuss all these things I have discovered the last few years. I have questions for her that I never thought to ask while she was here. {Insert tremendous sadness here}

Looking back to when I was seventeen, I liked who I was then. I was carefree, trusting and unafraid of life. I hitchhiked around Florida as if I believed no harm could come to me. When I met people along the way, I didn't worry about those I didn’t care for. A simple shrug of the shoulders and shaking of my head in disbelief, and I was onto the next adventure.

When things happen to us… traumatic things…

It changes us forever. The pieces of our soul scatter in the winds of these changes. We’re never the same.

There is our life before this happened, then it’s our life afterwards. The part in between these two lives is where our life either explodes or implodes.

Time would heal the intensity of my broken heart each time. Maybe not completely, but enough that I could finally carry on without doing myself in completely. Suicide has never been an option for me, though I understand how someone could get to this place mentally or emotionally. It happens when someone loses all hope of things ever changing for the better.

Over the last year or so, I have withdrawn myself from most parts of my life that I normally would be embracing. My soul has needed a deep cleansing sabbatical. Over the decades of my life, a great deal of emotional baggage and excess debris has been cluttering up my path. Now it’s time to do some spring cleaning.

I feel a great need to find those lost parts of my soul that I used to love. Those parts of me left behind in the heartbreaks need to be re-examined, and reinserted back into my life and soul. What others thought was disposable and not worthy of their care, might just be the things that I need to become who I was created to be.