Inspiration! I just came up with an analogy!!!

Not a nice one, I’m afraid. It says too much about me.

I was just thinking how I kept all that food (ok, it wasn’t a WHOLE lot, just a couple of leftover snacks… but after 2 weeks…. Yeah.) had kept buried underneath all the junk in my bag.

They are kind of like unresolved issues. I put them in there and they really stayed hidden from my consciousness – I forgot about them. Perhaps there was something nagging at the back of my mind, but as my personal motto is “What you don’t know can’t hurt you” my subconscious probably figured that as long as I didn’t think about it, it wouldn’t be a problem. I could just ignore it away.

It works – for some time. I would be bothered by this strange smell every once in a while – maybe even built a tolerance for it but didn’t know what it was. I didn’t really try to figure it out either. Not everyone could sense it. Some people are more sensitive than others in detecting things like that. When it went away momentarily, I just left it and was glad I did not have to deal with it.
Just because you ignore something, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. My nose could probably get completely used to the stench, even when it was uncovered, but I would be carrying trash around with me and people wouldn’t find me to be pleasant company.

Like remembering to unload my bag, I need to do a regular cleanup with my life. Unresolved feelings and issues will come back to haunt me after weeks and weeks of getting worse everyday.

I need to stop running away from my problems and trying to block them out. When I need to do some deep soul-searching, it would be much nicer if a stink bomb or stale deep-fried sweet potatoes didn’t turn up instead.