Be a sifter.

I was supposed to write something about my previous job – the daily struggle to come in on time, the last few episodes of not-so-nice-treatment, and basically, the truth about the rabbit inside the magician’s hat. But for the past six months, I still haven’t written anything about it. Not because I was afraid that someone from “the company” would find out about it, but because I simply don’t think it would change anything that has happened. To me, ranting about the company won’t make much difference, and it didn’t seem like I owe anyone an explanation of my decision to resign. So I chose to forgive and forget, to move on and not look back, and to be comfortable and at peace with my life choices. But the unwanted memories came back to bite me in the ass. Apparently, I was traumatized with how the whole thing went down; and apparently, I was affected more than I thought I was. The culprit: the whole litany about my job performance and the personal tirade that he (my previous boss/owner of the company) gave to me on my unexpected last day of work.

They say words are extremely powerful. You say something to someone and it means the world to them; then you say something else to someone and it crashed them to pieces. Words can be weapons yet they can also be powerful medicines; they can be taken back but there’s no guarantee that they can be forgotten; and they can be your best friend if your careful and wise enough to use them appropriately, or your worst enemy if your reckless and stupid.

As a sender, you never know the depth of your words to someone, or how far it would go to affect them, or how long it would take for them to grasp the meaning of it, but you say it anyway – sometimes with innocent intentions, sometimes with clear black and white reasons, but some other times, with just no meaning at all. As a receiver, you hear but you don’t listen; you hear what you want to hear; and you interpret things based on what you already know regardless of what you just heard.

So be a sifter. As a sender, choose your words wisely and appropriately to send the message; and as a receiver, filter through the message and save the good ones and leave out the harmful ones behind. Sift through your memories, experiences, and lessons in life – keep the good ones and let go of the bad ones. You can’t exactly control what’s going to happen to you, but you can control how you will feel about it and you can choose what to do or not to do about it.

So I choose to see the good things that I learned from that company and use it to my advantage in my new job; and I choose to let go of the pain that I incurred just from hearing (not listening to) “the speech” that was given to me on that day. And so I choose, from now on, to be a sifter rather than a traumatized residue of the past.