I saw a few pictures of myself from a couple of years ago and I felt, hmm, what’s a negative form of nostalgia? I hated them and wanted to distance myself from that feeling.
When you’re learning to love yourself are you learning to love all previous versions of yourself or just this current one?
It’s like looking at those pictures took me back to a time that I do not look upon fondly and a place that did not bring me many good times, I felt ill.
I’ve noticed that I’ve been thinking like this a lot lately. When I see people who aren’t really in my life now that knew earlier versions of me and they reminisce I get a serious urge to leave and will do my utmost to drag the conversation down a different more recent path, anything that avoids me having to speak on who I was. I guess the issue is that my current self doesn’t identify with who I was in the past. Not that much time has even passed between now and then but the changes internally have been so significant that any time spent dwelling on the past feels like regression, and invites this haunting feeling that I may become that again. It’s as though time spent in the past is like standing in quick sand, I can feel it dragging me in, and I hate it.
I like my present, I am excited for my future. I do not want to live in my past and while there are some memories I look upon fondly, I’d prefer not to be reminded of earlier iterations of me.
But what is it that I dislike so much about my past selves? There’s this TikTok I watched recently and this girl said “There is only one question that really matters: what is it that you are unwilling to feel?”. So what is it that I’m unwilling to feel here?
Perhaps I’m avoiding confronting my past selves maybe because I haven’t actually changed that much in a lot of ways and any serious reflection might make me notice that things aren’t all that different. So maybe I’m refusing to identify with my past because I don’t want to feel that I’m still the same. A fear that I’ve not changed. A fear that in the reflection I’ll find the same face looking back at me.
Wait.
No.
Fuck that.
I have changed. I am different. I have done more things, I’ve felt more things, I’ve been to more places, I’ve changed my opinions on things, I’ve developed thoughts more, and learnt a lot of new stuff. I am not the same. Okay fine. I may not have changed everything, and clearly there’s parts of current me that are far too similar to earlier versions of me, that I’m uncomfortable even confronting but reconciliation of the past and current self is necessary if I want to develop. And I do.
I know that I am different and this feeling I have, this fear, that I’ll regress into an earlier me from any reflection into my past is unjustified.
The feeling I’m “refusing to feel” isn’t just this regression thing, it’s also this sickly feeling that other people knew me when I wasn’t at my best. I see the me I am now as so much better than any other me and I’m almost ashamed that people had to meet these semi-formed versions of me that are so not who I am. In their minds, I’m still that same person. To them I’ve not changed.
In my posts I usually present some kind of cure to my anguish, and this time I have a few strategies on offer. Primarily, if a person is no longer in your life then fuck ’em, their opinion on you is so comically irrelevant to who you are now that you ought to just discard it (if you figure out how to do this, please let me know…). Secondly, you can go and interact with them as your present self – ideally you’d want this to be fairly organic but if you get the chance, and need to keep your ego nice and intact, you can go and meet these people who knew you as an earlier you, and present this new and improved version of yourself. Might help the ego. And finally, therapy. lol.
Anyway, probably time for me to take another look at the pictures.
Sumb Luck 