Living with the Memories of a Past Me
Memory is a strange thing, and sometimes I let the girl in my memory influence way too much of my present. Like when I’m driving to work listening to music and one of the songs she used to love comes on and it just feels different. It feels like only part of me is actually listening because the girl that used to love it doesn’t live in the present anymore. I have met about 20 different versions of myself. To name a few, the shy version that just wanted to be alone, the lost version that didn’t know who she was, the version that didn’t know her worth, and the version that taught herself how to heal. All building up to be the loud extroverted version that doesn’t really care what people think. I know I’ll meet probably a hundred other versions of myself over my lifetime, a mom version, an aunt version, and who really knows what kind of changes those versions will bring to my life.
However, the one thing I am learning to live with is the memories. All the past versions of myself share the same brain and some of my least favorite versions butt into a present they don’t have a place in. They don’t live in the present, and they don’t know the present the way I do, but they still like to pop up in my brain. Like when my boyfriend doesn’t answer the phone and the version of me that was in an unhealthy relationship pops up and tells me “What if he is mad at you?” or “What if he fell out of love in the past hour?”. Rationally and logically I know this is not realistic, present me knows, but part healing and growing from these past versions is having to deal with the memory of them. The memories aren’t all bad and they aren’t all fueled by anxiety, a surprisingly combustible material. Some are plain nostalgic. Like when I go to the sushi restaurant my best friends and I used to eat at all the time before going out or just reminiscing over drinks about all the crazy things my friends and I used to do. In these moments I’m flooded with the memories the past versions of myself shared during some of the happiest moments of my life. It’s fun to reminisce on the good times, but like I said memory is such a strange thing. In those times I often find myself questioning if maybe the older versions of myself were actually happier than the present, seemingly happy version of myself. Wondering if maybe the me then was actually the better version and if all this work and time I spent healing was actually just making me less fun or less happy. Realistically, I also know this is a far-fetched and anxiety driven way of thinking, after all I am still growing- growth is a never ending process.
Happiness is inconsistent, the true consistency is in being content with all the highs and lows of the present.
The past versions of me never understood that.
What I’m learning is that there is always going to be a part of me that misses and longs to visit the memories of past versions of myself, but that doesn’t mean the present version is any worse or any less happy just because I miss those moments. It means that with every new version of myself I will create more memories that will become nostalgic to me in the future. Healing has been a long, long process and has changed who I am in the present to someone that would probably be unrecognizable to any of the past versions of myself. However, so far she is my favorite. I’m still learning how to make peace with letting go of the past versions of myself, and making peace with living with the fact that happiness isn’t always consistent, but the version of me now is happier a lot more often than any of the past versions ever were.
