All These Things That I've Done

There is a story that lives inside of me. It snakes it's way in and out of my consciousness regularly, sometimes settling quietly somewhere in the back of my mind, but it always, always creeps back in. I know what I need to do, I've always known what I need to do - I've known what I've needed to do with this story since before it even happened, I think. I feel that I actually probably could have written this story in 2013, even though it didn't happen until 2017. Sometimes you just know, long before something happens, that it is going to happen. Unfortunately, it did.
I do carry guilt. I know I didn't directly cause anything that happened, and I sure as hell know that I couldn't have stopped it. But I still carry around guilt regardless.
I saw a therapist years ago - one of many - but this particular one did some amazing hypnotherapy work with me which allowed me to see things in a totally different light than I had for a long time. It allowed me to see all of my grief, guilt, shame, sadness as being stuffed into a backpack. I pictured it just as a regular backpack, like the one that you would take to school years ago, and the books inside were so heavy and crammed into the bag that the zips were almost bursting open. Except of course, the bag in my mind was full of all these things that I'd done. Or seen. Or witnessed. Or allowed to happen. And I'm carrying this bag absolutely everywhere that I go. The only time that the bag is ever opened, is to add more things to the bag. Not a single thing from my life I have let go. Not a single thing has ever really, truly been taken out of the bag. In the hypnotherapy session we did, I carried the bag into the bushland and I stopped on a little bridge over a river, and I threw the bag off the bridge and into the water. We recorded that session, and I played it back to myself a few times, reimagining throwing that bag with a lifetimes worth of trauma, into the water and watching it float away. Or sometimes it would sink. But one time, and I have no real memory of actually doing this but I suppose it must have happened, I jumped in after the bag and I dragged it back out of the river - waterlogged and all, and heavier than ever, I put the bag back on. And I've worn it ever since.
I wonder if writing this story - the one that lives inside of me - will help me let go of this forever. But even if I do find a way to finally let this go... who am I without it?