Your past doesn't need you, the present does
for the days you feel stuck and don't know how to move forward
There are parts of the past I find myself revisiting because I never want to forget the memory of how a specific moment made me feel.
I can listen to songs from when I was younger and feel myself pulled back to the nostalgic comfort my childhood held. Whether it’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” by Bonnie Raitt (one that was constantly blaring through my parents’ speakers and arguably the saddest love song there is), or “Your Song” by Garth Brooks (the first song I ever learned to sing with my mom), each one brings me right back to that simple, carefree time in my life.
I think about all the people who shaped my journey, for better or worse. The ones who pushed me to grow, especially when it was anything but comfortable. The ones who taught me something I never knew about myself, exposing vulnerabilities and cracking pieces of me open to reveal hard truths I didn’t know how to face at the time.
And the people who left shortly after they arrived, the ones who didn’t realize how much their short presence altered parts of me forever.
Then there’s of course, separate spaces for the people I never imagined I’d have to let go of. The ones who had an inevitable expiration date in my life, yet the bigger part of me kept wanting to hold on as a way to preserve the memories and times I never wanted to lose.
I look at time as a sense of passage, where memories become split into two compartments: the person we are before, and who we become after. Almost as if it’s a line marked in the sand, clearly separating one side from the next.
The past feels like a slippery slope at times. And if we’re not careful, we’ll remain stuck at the bottom without a way to climb back out of it.
Which leads to the questions: why do we hang on so tightly? Is it the pieces of ourselves we don’t want to give up, the fear of what the space looks like when we let go, or because a part of us wonders if what we once had was better than what’s ahead?
I’ve asked myself those questions a lot the last year. The irony of wanting to move forward, yet feeling stuck in the middle, is knowing you’re looking through a foggy lens without clarity on how to clear what’s in front of you.
I wrote the journal entry I shared at the beginning sometime last summer, when I was in the thick of grief. It was such a surreal emotion, and when I talk about being pulled back into old feelings, my heart physically aches remembering exactly how I felt. Almost like when you come across a familiar scent that places you right in the middle of an old memory that you didn’t even realize was still tucked away in your mind.
The train reference made me feel like I was standing in the middle of a station, watching people get on and off as they headed toward their destinations while I stayed glued to the same spot.
Time has a way of standing still when we’re begging for it to keep passing by. And it often seemed like everyone else’s life kept moving forward while mine was looping over and over without an ending in sight.
Holding on became this constant push-and-pull of wanting to let go, knowing I needed to let go, but feeling so unsure where that would lead me. Would that mean I’d forget what I wanted to remember? Would I feel a sense of shame for letting go, because that would mean moving on? Was there a way to carry and let more than one feeling walk alongside each other?
We hold onto the past because it becomes a security blanket of comfort. It gives us a sense of peace revisiting everything we didn’t want to lose, the memories and moments we hold tightly, and the times we truly felt were ‘the good old days’.
But the trap of living in the past is that, more often than not, we struggle to accept that our own minds keep us stuck in our thoughts. Or, as The Eagles put it: "So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains, and we never even know we have the key."
I’ve come a long way from the person I was a year ago. And I’ve fought hard to be where I am today. When I re-read my journal entry, it made me think about how much we stay in the past, even when we don’t belong there anymore.
I recognize who I once was, but I don’t envy that version of myself.
The past isn’t meant to be the place we reside, the present is. There’s so much more waiting for us in the future. But we’ll never reach our destination ahead if we keep staying stuck in what’s already happened.
Life is a series of lessons. Some come when we least expect it, while others overlap and keep repeating themselves until we’re able to take what we need from them to grow.
We learn more about ourselves when we have the faith to let go, to keep trusting that what’s ahead is far better than what we leave behind. It’s not meant to be an act of forgetting. But a hope to remember the choices that we made in the past shaped the way for everything that’s to come in the future.
Even if you’re in the middle of a season you can’t understand, a place you didn’t want to arrive at or a club you never thought you’d be in, more than one feeling can exist at once. And they often do.
It’s okay to hold space for grief, while letting joy overpower it. Or stepping forward with faith, yet still finding yourself having moments of doubt and realizing that some days might be harder than others. Letting go happens little by little, and you don’t have to let go all at once. Because more often than not, you won’t be able to.
The feeling of comfort will come from realizing you aren’t holding onto the pain any longer, only fragments in your memory of the person you were and the version of yourself you’ll never forget. The one that taught you how much strength you hold, and the part of yourself that kept going even when no part of you knew how.
The irony of being in the place you wanted to be all along, is that one day, you’ll look back and wonder how you got there. When you least expect it, you’ll find yourself anxious to get on the next train, ready to embrace what’s waiting for you ahead in your journey.
You’ll have a deep sense of knowing that every moment that brought you here was more than worth it in the end, because you never want a single second of your life to pass you by. And only then, will you realize, your past doesn’t need you anymore. But your present does.
Thank you so much for reading! Be sure to check out more of my work at Truth Within Silence and follow along on Instagram.
This is so beautiful, and a good reminder of the importance of being in the present (even if maybe your feelings are complicated). Thanks for writing this, Andrea!