The Thing About Hurt

Unfortunately hurt is a part of life. It’s inevitable. You can shield yourself from it but there would always be a chink in your armour.

After all, people who go with full armour to war still die.

Sometimes you’re stabbed in the back.

Sometimes you’re just a casualty of someone’s mistake.

You can’t always control how deeply you’re hurt. You can’t even control how long the pain would be there.

BUT

Like any feeling, hurt cannot control you if you don’t give it the power. It starts off overwhelming. You don’t know how you’d get out of it. Sometimes you’d feel pathetic that whatever happened hit you so hard in the first place but it’s like a ditch you fall into. You can brace yourself for impact but you can’t really predict the extent of your injuries.

So you’ve been hurt. Someone betrayed you. You may not be able to describe what exactly you feel. It may be pain. It may be anger. It may be deep disappointment. It may be disbelief. It may be confusion. It may be all of them at one go. Unfortunately, the sun does not stop shining. People did not stop going to work. If only the world could pause and wait for us. So either willingly or unwillingly, at some point you pick yourself up and sort of drag yourself through life. The things you can’t escape doing, you grudgingly do them, even though you feel like the world should just pause.

At some point, you start to harbour resentment towards whoever (singular or plural) hurt you. The moment they cross your mind, your mood changes. Even if someone passes you and you get a whiff of the perfume the guilty person puts on a lot, your mood switches at the twinkling of an eye.

I had successfully gotten them off my mind, Damn it!

People have different points they decide they need to move on. Some are more immediate than others. And the time it takes to actually move on from whatever happened may be much longer. But the thing we all need to realise is that no matter how deep whatever you feel is, it doesn’t affect the person in any way, even if they’re sorry. Letting go is not for them. It is for you. You can be in the way of your own recovery and the worst part about it is it’s only you who would be affected. Imagine shooting yourself and expecting someone else to drop dead.

Hurt doesn’t evaporate like magic, though. It takes time. You’d first have to decide you need to drop it and move on with your life. Then you’d need to keep making that decision over and over again till it sticks. Sometimes you’d feel like you’re taking five steps back after your previous two steps forward. That’s the problem with feelings. They’re too volatile. You can’t depend on them or gauge things properly with them. The thing you need to do is realise that it takes time and you can’t measure how long it would take. But it would happen. So keep pushing forward.

The thing about hurt is one day you’d remember and realise it doesn’t affect you anymore.