Today, for some reason, I started remembering unpleasant moments from my past, mostly involving my former colleagues. Every time these memories resurface, I shudder — it’s like my whole body wants to recoil and push them back into the shadows. Even now, nearly three or four years later, it all still feels disturbingly fresh. Ugly. Shameful. Disgusting. I could list a dozen more words.
Whenever I recall those times, I feel sick. Genuinely pained. And today, while riding in the car, I suddenly realized: I need to reclaim all the energy that those events and that chapter of my life drained out of me.
I’ve read countless times about “calling back your energy,” but since it’s not exactly a scientific practice, there are no step-by-step guarantees. Most of it relies on faith and intention. I realized I had no idea how to do it — but I knew I had to. So I just made a decision: right now, I’m taking it all back — every drop of energy that was siphoned out of me by that story. And instantly, I felt it: a huge surge of energy, rushing back in. Almost tidal.
What’s more, the people involved in that story — they suddenly lost all meaning. They no longer felt real in my psyche. They became flat, weightless.
Now, that whole episode feels like a piece of paper filed away in some dusty folder. Something from a past life. Something that isn’t mine anymore. It no longer hangs over me. It doesn’t sting. I don’t feel the urge to shrink in shame or disappear into the ground.
I don’t blame those people — my former colleagues. Though, if I ever told the full story, a few listeners might feel their skin crawl. And honestly, knowing how emotionally sensitive I am — how deeply I absorb the world — I’m surprised that all I walked away with was mild depression, PMDD, and a fairly short (only about a year and a half!) nervous breakdown.
Truly, one of the best decisions I’ve made in the last four years was leaving that company.
The psyche is a fascinating thing. In the moment, you don’t fully realize how bad things are. Your quality of life declines, your health deteriorates — but the suffering becomes your new normal. You just feel that everything is hard, but you can’t see the full depth of it until much later.
It’s only after time has passed — once you’ve “healed,” moved on, suppressed, or worked through it (or all of the above, in turns) — that you look back and think, My God. That was awful. That was monstrous. And no one helped. In fact, the people closest to me — even if they weren’t actively cruel — steadily chipped away at my well-being. Often not because they were bad people, but because they found it entertaining. They even found ways to justify it.
Because when you want to gang up on someone, when it feels fun to mock or humiliate someone, the mind will always find a way to rationalize it. Like: “They probably deserved it.” Meanwhile, no one ever stops to ask how that person is really living. How much they’re carrying. What it takes for them just to stay sane.
I remembered a story the other day — I don’t think I’ve ever shared it here.
When I was a kid, I spent a summer at a Soviet-style children’s camp on the Black Sea. I’ve always loved swimming, and that year the camp had a fairly relaxed schedule. We had a lot of freedom to play in the water.
Ira, a leader in our group, was popular, the camp director’s daughter. She was a great kid in many ways, but because of who she was, she got away with almost everything. She didn’t reflect much. Nothing ever bothered her.
Our group was incredibly close-knit. I even visited some of them years later. They were soulful, smart people. I’m sad we lost touch. But I digress.
One day, a bunch of us were swimming and goofing around in the sea. Our group had buoys placed pretty far out, in water deep enough that even the taller girls couldn’t touch the bottom without going fully under. I was short, so for me it was even deeper.
We were playing when suddenly I realized: Ira was trying to drown me.
Now, if you’ve ever played the “dunk game” as a kid, you’ll know the drill — push someone’s head under, they pop up laughing, you do it again. A few rounds of harmless chaos.
But this time, Ira — maybe thoughtless, maybe just drunk on power — decided to take it further. She kept pushing my head under. I couldn’t touch the bottom, so I had no leverage. I tried to surface for air, but she kept dunking me. Again. And again. And again.
I’d come up just enough to take the tiniest breath — not even a full lungful — and down I’d go. Each time it got harder. I was running out of strength. I could hear laughter, see faces, but everything was blurry.
Eventually, by sheer grace, someone on shore called us back in. Ira let go. I surfaced, barely breathing, and paddled to shore with the last of my strength. I crawled out of the sea and collapsed. I was conscious, but barely. I lay at the water’s edge, completely drained. I had almost died. No one realized. No one knew what they’d done.
They just thought it was funny — the way I’d bob up like a cork when Ira pressed down on me.
That was 25 years ago. And still, to this day, I remember it with visceral terror. I was unbelievably lucky to survive.
To me, reclaiming your energy means this: choosing to stop reliving the same pain over and over. Choosing not to torture yourself by reawakening the shame, the fear, the guilt — every time a memory resurfaces.
It means stripping those poisonous images of their life force, allowing them to fade into shadows.
There’s a difference between learning from the past and masochistically injecting yourself with another dose of shrapnel each time it comes up. We can’t throw the past away — and we shouldn’t. It holds lessons, insights, even inspiration. But it belongs in the archive — in a drawer marked “complete.” Its contents can be studied, but never again allowed to rise up and choke us.
We’re here to learn, not to lean. Just one letter apart — but what a difference that makes. 🙂
