The old skin

Sometimes you feel like the things that have happened to you in life, the events that have left their mark on you, are still with you. You feel that they are part of who you are, that they are with you in the present and will be with you for the rest of your life because, in addition, that is how it should continue to be. This way of thinking leads you to consider that the past, your past, is an inalienable fact and that, for better or worse, it is part of who you are.

So, you show yourself willing to give everything for who you were, for what you lived and for how you lived it. You defend that pain or hide that shame and you sanctify it because it was real then, and you consider that this fact confers enough “legitimacy” to continue being so.

As if failing to pay that tribute of shame or pain were a kind of betrayal of the facts themselves, or of the people with whom you shared them, you end up considering it fair to make yourself entitled to that non-existent balance.

And I say non-existent because that past is not part of who you are now, it is part of who you were at the moment in which those situations or experiences were experienced by you in that way.

Today, for better or worse, you are a different person. You are probably more experienced and have a wider field of vision. You have a greater understanding of the world than you had then, even more so if you were a child or a teenager, and the way you view those events that left their mark on you would not be the same now.

It is even possible that you saw different things and that, where you experienced abandonment by a partner or a parent, and felt undervalued, you were able to discover generosity. Where you judged yourself incompetent for not having known how to choose your future, you discovered a broad vision that, beyond giving up, has offered you the possibility of trying again. Where you judged yourself unfair or cowardly, you discovered yourself responsible or authentic.

The idea I defend in this post is related to the right and duty to visit our past from who we are, from everything we have learned and transcended because it is possible that, if we do it from this place where we now find ourselves, from this new stage of our life, we will discover lights where we saw shadows, we will find generosity where we believed exclusion, ignorance where injustice, etc.

Or maybe not, we might find exactly the same thing, and in any case, from who we are today, not from who we were and will no longer be, from all that we have learned and transcended, we will surely be able to decide with greater freedom if what we should feel about that moment in our history is shame or admiration, indifference or appreciation, prejudice or pride. Pride in having done well. In having done, at least, the best we knew and could at that moment.

By revisiting the past from who we are, rewriting it from our new capacity and experience, we will be able to recover that part of ourselves that we thought was lost and make it ours again, have all our potential for development and use it because the old skin, like the abandoned shirt of a snake that has grown too big to stay inside it, does not deserve to continue defining the size of our dreams.