“I am still learning how to go back and re-read my own chapters without feeling like I want to set all of my pages on fire.”
E. V. Rogina
Ever feel like this? Ever think that you wish you could scratch out a part of your past? Ever want to lie (or actually did lie) about something you have done, thought, felt, because you’re afraid if people actually knew who you really are or what you’ve really done, well they wouldn’t want anything to do with someone like that.
Well guess what? You’re not alone. Many of us do this. We are scared of our pasts. Ashamed of them. Haunted by the idea that the choices we presently make are so incongruent with that past, people wouldn’t…dare I say couldn’t believe we have changed.
Yet we have changed. All of us. We cannot stay in the same place. We are always moving. We may carry with us the dead weight of choices we have made, yet it won’t stop us from evolving. We are literally wired to do this. To adapt. To grow. To become better versions of ourselves. To not only survive, but to thrive in this world.
So now you’re asking…”What is that Dr. Marr rambling about now?” Here it is folks: Nothing about our mistakes in the past define who we are in our present. One of my favorite quotes by Maya Angelou is “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” Our brains not only compel us to do this, our genetic makeup actually wires us to do this.
So guess what that means? Your mistakes. Those shameful events from your past. Those are as integral a part of your beauty today as are the successes you’ve made. Indeed they are some of your greatest successes. (That’s right, I just said the mistakes you feel ashamed of having done in your past are some of the most beautiful aspects of who you are today!)
So, Dr. Marr is rambling today to tell you…we NEED to love these mistakes as much as we love our successes. We don’t have to love them the same way though. Having a reverence for our failings as much as we have for the goals we’ve met is a matter of how much relevance we allow those lessons to mean in our life. It is not about how much we like them.
So stop thinking compassion means we have to “like” our past. It merely means we hold these lessons in as high a regard as we do things that we easily want to elevate from our pasts.
So go on. Love it. All of it! The bad and the good. The ugly and the beautiful.