Do You Want a Different Past or a Better Future?

I went “home” again last week (hence the brief hiatus from posting). And much to my surprise, it fucked with me. Just like it always does – even though I haven’t lived there for fifteen years.

Admittedly, growing up in Las Vegas meant I had a bizarre fucking childhood. Not because my family was involved in the casino industry or the mob, but because Vegas is not a real place. It’s not representative of the way the world operates outside of itself. Or, maybe it’s a hyper-concentrated version of all the negative messaging we’re bombarded with in a capitalist, patriarchal society: look out for yourself first! Appearance over substance! Buy more, spend more, indulge more, and make sure you look good doing it!

But Vegas isn’t really the problem. 

The challenge is really just returning to the scene of a lot of pain and misery and helplessness – what childhood looked like for a lot of us, regardless of where we actually grew up. And going back to those places inevitably stirs shit up, whether we’re consciously aware of it or not.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how our emotional landscape is kind of like a glitter jar (probably because I finally made myself one after therapy last week, and it. is. awesome!!). When the jar gets radically shaken, everything is all over the place and it takes a while for things to settle. It’s also super obvious that shit’s stirred up. But sometimes, the jar just gets swirled around a bit and the glitter is moving on a lower level. Things get kicked up, but it’s not as obvious. 

This is an imperfect analogy (as usual), but the point is that we all have layers of awareness and hurt and emotional stability and trauma that are interrelated and not always obviously connected. Things can get stirred up below the surface, and we may or may not understand how they’re impacting us. The important thing to remember is that there’s nothing wrong with us for having emotional reactions to things. Especially our past.

Mourning a Painful Past Is Hard. Period.

I did not have a happy childhood – at least not from age nine onward (that’s when we moved to Vegas and my emotional landscape went to shit). No amount of therapy or wishful thinking is going to change that. It doesn’t matter who or how I am today, how much work I’ve done and the ways that I’ve slowly built self-esteem over time. It doesn’t matter that I like myself today in a way that was completely unfathomable in my youth. I was still a lonely, confused, overweight kid filled with self-loathing and suicidal ideation (at times). Then I was a desperate, confused, insecure teenager who sought validation and approval in all the wrong places. And it sucked.

Much as my adult self can do work in therapy and show up in the day-to-day to care for the kid in me that didn’t get what she needed – that doesn’t change the reality that she didn’t get what she needed when she needed it.

That’s why going back to the scene of all that misery can be so hard. It stirs up all the shit and memories and rough times that I don’t have to be confronted with on the daily when I live in a new city, 982 miles away. And it stirs shit up in ways that are sometimes obvious and often not – because trauma is stored in the body whether or not it also comes up in conscious memory.

So whenever we’re around the people, places, and things that remind us of painful and traumatic times, it makes a lot of sense that we’d find it difficult to keep our cool. The mistake, I think, is in expecting otherwise. In trying to erase all that pain by pretending it didn’t/doesn’t still impact us. Or, in thinking that just because it’s been however long since all that happened, it shouldn’t still affect us. That we “should” be over it by now.

That’s just not how it works sometimes. Sometimes the best we can do is improve our tolerance levels and be kind to ourselves when thinking or being around the past is hard. Grief is cyclical, and it makes sense that we might be in perpetual mourning for a past we didn’t get to have.

We Don’t Get to Have a Different Past

It can be really hard to let go of wanting a different past, wanting things to have been better for that younger version of you. Perhaps it’s just the very young version of you, wishing that childhood had been better, more nourishing, more loving. But this also crops up with adult shit, too. 

It’s super easy to fantasize how things might have been different with that last relationship, that broken friendship, that job that got away. The imagination is a powerful thing, and it can feel impossible to stop imagining how things could have played out, how happy we might have been if only ___. 

Except that’s all just fantasy. It’s no more real than imagining what it would be like if all the raindrops were lemon drops and gum drops. Indulging in the what ifs (or, more often for me, the “why couldn’t they just”) leaves us dissatisfied, resentful, and wishing for the impossible.

We don’t get to have a different childhood. We don’t get to have different, more emotionally adept parents. We don’t get to change where we grew up or what kind of trauma that inflicted on our poor lil’ selves. We don’t (in general) get to have relationship do-overs, no matter how much we’ve changed/grown/learned since the break up. And the more we hold onto the fantasy that it could have been different or the people in our lives should have been any different from how they were – the longer we stay stuck.

We Do Get to Leverage Our Past to Improve Our Present

The only value in those what ifs is in applying them to our present. If we can identify the ways that people failed us in the past, that we let ourselves down, that (as adults who had more choice in the matter) we put up with behavior that was harmful to us, then we can make better choices today. 

We can choose to look for red flags and harmful patterns from our past, and then do our best to avoid them moving forward. We can choose to learn more about healthy boundaries and how to practice them. We can choose to start doing things differently, even though it’s uncomfortable. And all of that, even small, incremental changes, will add up over time.

We can learn to manage our expectations better and to stop going to Home Depot looking for milk – i.e. to stop trying to get things from people that they just don’t have to offer. We can learn to identify things that don’t work for us in relationships and situations and then choose to opt out before they become problems. 

None of that is possible, though, if we don’t know what to look out for. So, when you catch yourself ruminating on what could have been or should have been, instead of just hanging out there, take note of what that actually means. 

When I catch myself thinking about how people “should” have behaved differently, I can take that information and apply it to the present:

• If my needs weren’t met in the past, what were those needs? Can I articulate them clearly? What would it look/feel like for someone to meet them now?
• What are the red flags to look out for so that I don’t end up in a similar relational dynamic in future? (Write these out and share them with a friend to ensure accountability).
• If relationships had poor boundaries, what were the boundaries that were trespassed? How can I take that information and set better boundaries in my life now?
• What didn’t/doesn’t work for me in terms of emotional safety and support? What are my triggers, and can I communicate those to people in my life now so that they know how to support me?
• Were there times when I wasn’t able to advocate for myself? How can I practice self-advocacy now so that I’m better prepared moving forward in my relationships?

The only thing we really have control over is how we respond to the world around us. We can’t change the past. We can’t change other people. What we can do is choose to stop ruminating and make the most of what the past taught us. Doing things differently is often uncomfortable, but it’s the only way to get different results. 

The past is done and gone, but the future is filled with possibility. We get to shape that possibility through the decisions we make today. So, let’s all just do our best to make one better decision today and let the our shitty past go fuck itself.