Aug 26, 2018
The Most Dangerous Thing In the World
Ever since I was a child, I have never thought much of people in general. I was always slightly introverted, and I became more and more recluse as I grew up in a place where social interaction was unusual: my parents are not really people people. Neither of them had many friends at all after they got married. They didn’t even talk to the handful of people they stayed in contact with very often. Even my friends were never welcome at home, which meant that I didn’t get much social time at all outside of school. The social inbreeding was intense and unpleasant. My natural reservation, coupled with an environment where everyone is the same, made me think for a long time that people were just unnecessary.
Of course, that didn’t set me up for especially excellent social interactions throughout life. My mother, a person I used to hold the closest out of everyone in my life, is gone. Many of my friends didn’t last very long. Even my most significant relationship (excluding my nuclear family) thus far, my girlfriend, is plagued with demons from the past. It’s hard to understand how even grown adults can be affected by such trivial events that have passed, but the truth is things from your past affect you in ways you might never know.
In my past, I wasn’t a happy child at all. Self harm, bullying, wild temper, chronic depression, it’s all there. The fact that I was so unhappy for so long still changes things I do today, years and years later. I could have a fantastic day filled with great food, great friends, and plenty of fun, and still come home, sit down in my chair, and feel like something took all the happiness out of five hundred puppies and just crushed it right in front of me.
The past still haunts me. Maybe I’m just young, or maybe I’m especially bad at this, but I think it’s quite a common thing. And every time I talk to someone about this stuff, they’ll say something like “the past is the past”, which is the most insensitive, uncaring, and rude thing to say to anyone in this situation.
You have to accept that your past is still here. It’s not gone.
You’ve probably moved on from a lot of it, but some of it is still with you. Some of it is still hurting you. However big or small that piece is, it’s yours to find and wrestle with. That’s why it’s so dangerous: bad things happen to you that you just don’t think about once they pass. Yet they still affect you, causing unpredictable behavior and problems. Trust me, you can’t just forget about everything that happens to you.
Case in point: When I was in the ninth and tenth grade, I was the most academic, focused, and studious loser on campus. If I saw the ninth or tenth grade version of myself on the street today, I would kick the shit out of him. I would tell him to get the hell out of his textbooks and create some meaning in his life. That’s how pedantic and irritating I was back then.
Ironically, this was also the period of my life where I was the most distracted.
One thing many people don’t realize when they advocate for education is that academic institutions are not the only things imprinting knowledge onto students. Fellow students have just as large of an impact on education as the school does, sometimes more. In my case, ninth and tenth graders were useless little cockroaches that worried about trivial things and didn’t make much with their lives at all, so the bad influence was overwhelming. Any time I wasn’t studying, I was playing computer games, browsing memes, and watching movies. I’ve never been one for moderation, so when I was unhealthy, I was unhealthy.
Of course, my natural success drive slapped me in the face sooner or later, and I snapped out of it. I gave up all that shit for a long time. I forgot it all, intentionally. I moved on.
Flash forward to college, and I got hit with the pressures of being a functional adult for the first time. Boy, it was tough for the first few weeks. In my moment of weakness, what did I turn to? All the same useless shit I wasted time on before, as a teenager. But this time, it was worse since I had more money to spend.
You can’t just forget your past. You have to wear it like a badge.
It doesn’t have to be a bad thing. But if you try to ignore it, it will be. Your past is dangerous but not necessarily harmful because it provides something valuable: experience to learn from.
I didn’t learn from my ninth and tenth grade years, and instead just forgot it. That’s why I fell for the same thing again. You have to spend time reflecting on things in order to truly move on with them, smarter. It sounds like a no-brainer, but in reality it’s hard to always find time to pause and reprocess what just happened. We always want to move faster and faster forward on a base that’s murky and uncertain. That’s the cause of many of our problems — we’ve actually gone through the same thing before, it’s just that we didn’t learn enough when we did before.
It can be unpleasant to think about your history weighing you down, but I believe filing things away correctly is a constant form of maintenance that saves you a lot in the long run. Once in a while, try stopping and reflecting. Think about what just happened. Think about what it means to you, and how you can use it moving forward.
And if you want to see what a reflection might look like, try this:
