How do I let go of pain I keep holding on to?

I will always go backwards to old photos, past memories, nostalgia, just to feel okay. I keep reminiscing about people I know I will never reach out to again, because it feels better knowing it has ended. Why? So the pain is allowed to be real. And why hold on to pain at all? I think part of me believes it helps me, because my writing has come from those places and it has reached people.

What can you do today with whatever is sitting on your chest? Ask it the question I had to ask mine: what are you for? Maybe it gave you something, like sight, softness, or the words for someone else's night. If it has already given you what it had to give, you are allowed to put it down. Not by pretending it did not happen, but by letting yourself be okay in what is real to you right now: your life.

For a long time I believed that was why I had to carry the pain, that the writing needed the wound. But I'm learning I don't have to stay in the pain to write, and that reaching out, to someone in my life now rather than someone in an old photo, is worth it. The sight stays even when I set the weight down. That is the utility. I accept where I am now rather than questioning why I am here, and perhaps that is the only shift that ever needed to happen.