Not Going Back

I have been keeping an eye on the American elections, the divide between the political parties, their policies and followers.

Every four years I am struck by how passionate people are about the future of their nation and this year the stakes are even higher which means the drama is more cutting edge.

Regardless of your views or where you stand on the issues on the table, if you have been following the journey, you will have heard the phrase, ‘not going back’.

This is a phrase that resonates with a lot of people and it resonates with me. I think politics aside, this phrase will apply to every single person because there are things in our lives and past that this will be the most appropriate response that we can have to them.

If given the option what would you say you are not going back to? What time in you life and what experiences would you not want to go back to? As I thought about this phrase, I recalled many things that I declared, ‘I am not going back’ to.

Some people have experiences of bullying, sexual, physical, religious or financial abuse in their past and they will gladly declare they are not going back. Others may have been in relationships and friendships where they were taken for granted and they would also say they are not going back.

Maybe you were an ‘abuser’ or controlling in your relationships and having turned a new leaf, you have to remind yourself that you are not going back to being that person again.

Perhaps you have battled addiction of some sort and gone as low as any one can go but now you are healing and on the way up; you can also declare, ‘I am not going back’. Maybe yours was a traumatic childhood and you join your voice to declare that you are not going back. The slob in the family could say they are not going back, the person who constantly brought home a bad report could join the call to say they will no longer be a slacker.

A job in a company with a toxic culture might have left enormous scars that made you declare you are not going back to that company or others with similar traits.

For someone else, it could be that you believed lies about yourself, your body image, and your mind that spiralled you into eating disorders and now you are saying, ‘I’m not going back’.

Regardless of your reasons for making or owning the statement, one thing will be common which is that what you don’t want to go back to is likely to represent negativity, doom, gloom, sadness, shame, sickness, pain, humiliation, discord, threats, in-fighting, loss of identity, loss of freedom, loss of equality, financial loss, incapacitation, addiction, bullying, intimidation, fear, panic, attacks and even loss of lives.

Everyone likes to remember the good times or ‘good old days’ as some say but the key word there is ‘good’ but no one wants to go back to a time they would rather forget and that is likely to be because the time was the opposite of or anything but good.

In America, some people want to go back to a time when they felt in control and believed things were simpler, a time when women did not vote and there was divide and inequalities along race, ethnicity and religious beliefs. For many this was a time when even fewer people controlled most of the wealth and got to be the decision makers. Others argue this is a time they don’t want to go back to.

Regardless of how bad or good a season is in a country, company or business, there will be winners and losers but on a personal level, each of us can identify a time that we can hand on heart say we never want to see that time come around.

Hopefully we learnt the lessons we needed to learn during those seasons, we were stretched and discovered a resilience we didn’t know we were capable of, perhaps we found allies in unexpected places and built new relationships whilst leaving others behind.

I have my list of things that I am not going back to and I hope you have yours too. Together we can take a stand and declare, ‘we are not going back, we are not going back, we are not going back’.

Thanks for reading and sharing my post.