Fayetteville, GA

a journey into a past

All the things I could have been but never really was.
It is a place where all my ugly truths decided to come out.
I used to think that all the years I spent there were just wasted time. Precious time I could have spent somewhere else. But I realized something the other day. That time was not wasted. All my insecurities, all my problems, all my anger and recklessness, weakness, and selfish thoughts were born there. I wish I could say they died there, but they didn't, at least not entirely. Yet that is why I loathe the town with such  a passion. I was on re-feed of all the old patterns. Every time I'd try to break the chain, it would pull me tighter, the tube would slide farther into my veins. The slipknot effect.
That is until I left.
I loved and hated everything about myself there. And even though the skeletons will never really go away, they are subdued now, and not erupting into angry rashes on my flesh like before. I can analyze them objectively now. It upsets me how heartless and naiive I was back then. I did not fight my demons. I just brushed them off and refused to think about them until the morning, when I'd brush them off again. But that's not the point. How can everyone I know, sometimes including me, live their months, years, so...meaninglessly? I choose to question now, but I didn't back in Fayetteville. I made it seem like I did, hanging with crowds who always had something to say about nothing, throwing their two cents in on anything to anyone who gave half a damn. It made me feel like I was hanging out, associating myself with people who were intelligent. People who truly wanted to know WHY we had to elect presidents to keep the country stable, WHY we chose to love other people instead of just remaining alone, free of the possibility of other's emotional pain.
But inside, I felt like there was something wrong.
These freinds of mine, these "forward-thinkers", chose to revel stagnantly, whether by choice or professed misfortune, in their more-than-once chewed over thoughts and roach-filled, shithole apartments. Never an inkling of a better, more hopeful possibility of a life, future, or world, let alone living arrangements. And if they might have, no actions sprung from the hands who acted out the words in which the mouth spoke so poignantly.
It made me sad, a sick weighty feeling in my gut that screamed at me to leave, because if I didn't, I never would. I am not better than my old freinds. I am not trying to say that I am. I can just take a step back now and look at what I was becoming. I didnt like her. If I am to become a better person, a woman of God, or at the very least a good woman, I cannot sit back and allow myself to see a cheap, plastic imitation of who I wish to be in the mirror every morning.
I must work, work hard to change myself.
Even if that means giving up bad habits, bad situations, even bad people. I try to rescue people by nature. Help them. Get them so somewhere better than where they were before they met me. But sometimes, you have to rescue yourself before you can send a lifeboat out to someone else.
And that is the sole reason why I left Fayetteville.
There are people that need help everywhere, but that town to me was the dark, bottomless shaft of human hopelessness.
OR.....maybe I am wrong. Maybe it is a great town.
I just never saw it that way.
If I ever to talk to God, I will ask him to save Fayetteville.

Reviews

[John Harden]

"But sometimes, you have to rescue yourself before you can send a lifeboat out to someone else.
And that is the sole reason why I left Fayetteville."

That realization is amazing and the action to leave is bold. Nice write.