To be betrayed, to be abandoned by those you trust is a harsh thing, a lesson in cruelty inflicted by the malicious and the cowardly. To suffer loss, heart ache, sadness at our past is a natural thing for life is a hard mistress is it not. It teaches us not with a kind caress but with a barbed whip, the lashes leaving scars in the flesh of the spirit and like open wounds they must be treated, the wound cleaned and closed so it can heal. To forget, no, to move past transgressions against us is of paramount importance. To know when to say goodbye to the things that haunt us, that occasionally rise in dark moments and grip us, is vital to becoming the Men we wish to be. To forget is not merely enough, to move beyond it, to come to terms with these events, no matter how hard, is what is needed. It can be difficult, tremendously so, some wounds are deep, shards of the past surface and stifle us, the walls of memory enclosing in and trapping us in the moment again and again, forcing who we are down and bringing the walls we built to resist the corrosion of this age against ourselves, we in turn become our own worst enemy. We become warped creatures, in place of past events shaping us for the better we become misshapen parodies of ourselves, a walking, talking simulacrum of the person we are meant to be. A hollow man not too dissimilar to those who partake in the degeneracy of this epoch, only in place of hedonistic pleasure it is the pain of memory.

To vanquish such a thing is no easy task. It takes courage, strength, the Will to do so and as in all things related to fighting for a greater cause such things must start with ourselves. I too found myself lost in recent times. I had become despondent, hopeless, merely operating on basic functions, my soul silent, my heart empty. I had lost myself. But I was reminded that it need not be that way by someone important to me. That the sorrows of before can be defeated, that to live vicariously through others is not living but merely existing. That if we are to be true to ourselves, true to our ideals and our dreams we must become the Men we once were, the Men we are and the Men we will be. If we are to do this we must break our own chains for if we were to fail, if we were to remain hollow then our dreams, our aspirations, our hopes would wither and die with us. But how do we do so, how to do we confront that which haunts us so? By allowing us to feel these moments, by working through them. It is not a painless process. It will test you. Maybe even break a part of you. But if we do not, if we do not find the strength to let the past wash over us like water then it will haunt us, our mistakes, our choices, our personal history forever holding sway over who we become, shaping us in ways that twist us beyond who we are.