No Future in the Past

As William Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, "To thine own self be true." But which self was he referring to?

The person I was 20, 30, 40 years ago...the person for whom I planned my current life by working toward career goals, falling in love, saving money for a rainy day. I am invariably different today from the person I was then. What made the future person part of who I was then, what made them worthy of my self sacrifices and considerations, what did I teach myself?

Was it a mistake to try to satisfy my future self with my past choices? Daniel Gilbert suggests that, at any point along our personal timeline, we tend to believe that who we are at that precise moment is who we will always be. That we have arrived at our destination of being. Which, of course, is wrong.

"Human beings," Gilbert writes, "are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’ve ever been."

We think of ourselves as static, with lives that unfurl in logical progression, like a computer program. In reality, we all change throughout our lives, become people at different times, sometimes surprising ourselves, other times being predictable. It's important to remember all the people that we used to be while at the same time acting like my future self, rather than my former self. Embrace uncertainty and change, learning and failure, honesty and humility.

We tend to place importance emphasis on our present selves, cling to our current identities and speak in well defined terms about who we are now. When we label ourselves as an introvert, extrovert or whatever else, we leave little room in our minds of change. We need to understand we change and allow ourselves to do so.

The truth is, we are not the same persons we were in the past. We don’t do things the same way we once did, or we may no longer want what we once wanted. We label ourselves and focuse on who we are today, when we should instead recognize how much we’ve grown and changed from our former selves.

We have specific ideas about who we might become in the future. There are the ideal selves we hope to become, the probable selves who we could likely become, the dark selves we are afraid of becoming.

We need understanding (some would say innerstanding) to know who we are, who were were, who we have yet to become, to comprehend our true nature.

Maria Popova writes that "history is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgement and chance." Tracing my genealogy has taught me it is easy to mistake the records of life for history, how I imagine or label something for what it really was, chance for choice.

Life depends on change and renewal. Clarity of vision comes with age and wisdom. Or does it? Whom am I to decry what I did in the past in an attempt to satisfy my future self? Was I smarter in the past, as I tend to tell myself, or is the best yet to come?

That Was Then, This is Now

I was hemorrhaging emotions. All the optimism I had was being pumped out of my body. Positive thoughts, energy, my ability to focus, everything that made me who I am was being drained from me.

My brain didn't work. Thoughts took what seemed like years to process. I made mistakes and made mistakes correcting the mistakes. It felt like the connections in my brain that send thoughts from one place to another were offline.

I was fine until I wasn’t. It was a slow spiral. I went from fully functional to a this in a matter of weeks. I didn't see it happening.

Was I great before? Hardly. I was tired, edgy, emotional. I was getting through and thought I could handle it. The level of stress and overwork were normal. There was no signpost indicating my current path was worse than any other time.

That was then.
 

I have allowed myself time and space to process and feel the pain, sadness, grief, the uneasy emotions. I tell others to be compassionate with themselves, to give themselves a break, to learn from their past.

I am taking my own advice. I am aboard a fast moving freight train with many twists and turns in the tracks, multiple stops and starts, emotions loaded and unloaded.

There are days when I feel completely alone, and I know that's the depression talking, as I have support around me. I cry and have breakdowns of self-control. Other days I am on top of the world, positive the worst is behind me, looking at a bright future, appearing to have my shit together.

When I write procedures, I try to be thorough and explain why things need to happen in a specific way. When I write instructions for myself, I include "Trust me, I'm from the past." It's my way of reminding myself there are reasons to the order of operations, to think through the process and it will become clear, to know I did this work before and can do it again.

Life happens. One day everything is fine, the next you're flat on your back and don't want to crawl out of bed. The thing we all have to remember is we can only control what we can control. I've never been good at that, but I'm trying.

Every hardship and setback shapes you, changes you, and will someway help you be more resilient.

I am feeling uncertain, not my usual self, and frankly sometimes downright scared. Will I be better? I put my faith in the future to guide me to where it needs to. And I leave this as a note to myself, to remind me I can do it. Trust me, I'm from the past.

Rewrite

I had pretty much given up writing. It wasn’t fun, it felt contrived and I no longer cared enough about myself to exercise that part of my brain.

It was no longer joyful, effortless, fun. Trying to write, to release what was pent up inside and to try to make sense of it, defeated its own purpose. I was pushing an agenda, trying to defeat the darkness in my life. It should have been comfort, like a friend you know so well and for so long you just let them be with you. I wasn't okay with it lacking prose or meaning, to just be writing, to be the equivalent of having a bad day or just calling off and not making it in to work. It had to be more, to have depth, to be significant and consequential. When your life lacks control, you try to control your life, and I needed my writing to be perfect.

My job was grueling and the situation at home was all consuming. I gave up everything that was me during that time. All I did was work and sleep and work more from home on the weekends. When I tried to focus on what I needed, I didn’t get it right and made things worse. When I didn’t focus on what I needed I just buried everything until it erupted. That wasn’t a good choice, as it let me down a path that made me not be me.

I was fragile and acted strong, until one day my fragile strength abandoned me. I stopped writing. I stopped thinking I deserved to be happy. My deepest longings were replaced by my deepest fears.

I’m not even sure I’m me now. We all change, so who knows if I’m really still the person I think I used to be. Knowing that I am not alone gives me a level of comfort, to help with what I can only describe as a pane of glass being completely shattered. I am still trying to put myself back together.

To some extent I feel more like I think I used to in a long time, but who can really know. Is the story we are writing of our lives, filled with bittersweet, heart wrenching, beautiful, and soulful emotions and moments, really just a fantasy about how we wish our life had gone?

I wish I was smart enough to know what would be better for me. But I don’t, so I keep trying.
We must take the risks we are asked to take, we must put ourselves out there and remember not everything in this world is good or bad, it just..is. No point in crying over spilled emotions, but I still do it. I write and rewrite and start again.

Runaway Train

Losing control. We say that like we really had it at one point, but in reality all we ever had was a sense we understood how things were going, where we were headed and how we could influence the outcome. But that small impact we make in life that goes on whether we are here or not is all we have, so we cling to it. We say we are in control. We say we make our own destiny.
 
Loss of control is not a trivial fear; it is human and ingrained in our being. "Nawa" ("The Rope") is a work of short fiction from surrealist author Kobo Abe. He writes that:
 
"The Rope" and "The Stick," together, are one of humankind's oldest "tools." "The Stick" is for keeping evil away; "The Rope" is for pulling good toward us; these are the first friends the human race invented. Wherever you find humans, "The Rope" and "The Stick" also exist.
 
Tools to connect and disconnect, to attract and repel. Extensions of the hand, which both grips and releases. Without both of these abilities, it is useless. As newborn infants, we grab what comes near us, holding on to what we don't yet know, trying to figure it out, to control it. Later in life we grab on to ideas, thoughts, pride, still trying to figure it out, still trying to control it. And if we are lucky we learn that holding onto something for too long means there is so much else we never held, what we left behind, what we couldn't understand. To grasp something new means to let something go, exchange some ideas for new ones, confront our own values, face the words we have said in the past.

Courage can mean holding on; it can also mean letting go. Life is a difficult balance between the two. It's not a lesson we are taught in school and often we're not prepared for it. Fortunately, we go through life learning, sometimes quietly and without even realizing it, sometimes full of grief and pain from the lesson.

Peter Pan illustrates the deep connection between holding on and letting go. As Wendy is about to leave Neverland. Peter is crying and says, “It hurts so bad…” Wendy, in her ageless wisdom replies, “It’s supposed to hurt, that’s how you know it was important.”
 
Isn't that what life is all about? To look for meaning, resolution of stressful feelings, and the eventual easing of sorrow. To come to terms with constant change and perpetual departure. To understand our deep-seated desire for certainty and control is really more about give and take, about achieving balance. To increase our mastery over the power to hold on, and to let go.