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There are people in this world who are stuck in the past. I know that to be true because I currently happen to be one of those people. Someone maybe said something nasty to you one time, and you never got over it. When I’m alone and I’m not occupied with my phone or anything attention-consuming, I sometimes find my mind wandering back to the most hurtful moments in my life. And I feel deeply wounded because I think about how that person had some sort of access to me that others did not have. Not in like a “ooOoOOoh special privileges have been granted” to this person type of way. More so this person was acclimated to a version of me that others hadn’t brought out in me. I haven’t even begun to fully consider whether I liked the kind of person I was back then. I had some good habits, and some really bad ones. I don’t know if it’s a net zero situation. That’s some thinking I’ll save for later.
These days, I go over past arguments in my mind. What could I have said better? Why didn’t I say this instead? I went too far with that one. I should’ve done this to avoid that.
To be frank, it’s has officially gotten annoying. It has gotten to a point where I am sick of myself. I’m tired of my brain dragging me back to those scenes in the past. Whenever I regurgitate what I could have said to that person in my head, it feels like I’m sort of frozen in time. My mind sucks me back into that stupid interaction I had with them a year ago. It almost feels like the days and months that came and passed after it were not real, that nothing has happened after that day happened.
It really sucks that part of me is there instead of here, in Real Time. It’s hard. I’m not fully here, but I’m also not fully there. I’m using the precious time I have now in the present to think about the past. The past is gone, and the more I think about it, a figment of my imagination. I haven’t voluntarily consented my brain to drag me back to those bad moments in my mind. Maybe my mind is trying to say something. In trying to delegitimize and bury those wounding words in The Cemetery of my mind, it seems I have done the complete opposite. Right now, that person’s words hold so much power over me.
Some days, I spend hours thinking about the exact words they chose to utter and what that revealed about how they viewed me. Other days, I say graphic words to the imagined version of them in my head. Is doing that justified? No. I don’t think so. I think the past should be in the past, and yet here I am, performing countless variations of the same event in my mind because I believe that I didn’t get to say what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it at that moment in real life.
If that person is still in my life, I don’t want to go up to them now and ask or say the things I want to say about that interaction we had in the past. I don’t care about who they are now. I want to get even with the person I was having the argument with; the person they were a year ago. But that person is gone.
So, this is a rough picture of how this whole process goes:
- X number of years ago, Person(s) said/did something to me.
- It is now the present, and incident plays fresh in my brain.
- Brain points out perceived shortcoming(s); decides to bombard me with flashbacks.
- I get too invested in that incident and run simulations of how it could’ve gone better.
- I feel bad.
So, what’s the lesson to be learnt here? How do I get past this?
My life has felt stagnant ever since because in some way, I think I genuinely believed the words those people said. What they said really scarred me for life, and their words still hold significant weight. I gave their words power over me because even though I wasn’t willing to admit it to myself, I believed some of what they said about me. Life felt dull after those cruel and sobering verbal altercations, and so I put myself in timeout. I consciously chose to withdraw to a dull space. I didn’t go out much. I didn’t look forward to anything. It’s been a year, but I’m still there.
I now fully see this feedback loop, and just now, I have made the conscious decision to not feed this monstrous cycle. It’s only going to make me sad. People already say that I overthink things, and this whole loop is making me retreat more into my mind. If this persists, I’ll become even more withdrawn. I won’t participate in my real life. I don’t want that for myself. I’m opting out by investing more in the here and now that I find myself in. The first thing my mind poses as a solution is to be grateful to Allah that my problems are so first world, and that somewhere out there, there is someone who has it ten times worse than I do.
The second is to do something I enjoy. Well, here I am. I like this. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; I’m not afraid to regurgitate my love of writing. I think it really is that good. You should try it out for yourself. As a child, I was never really encouraged to explore my interests. I don’t believe I was encouraged to even have any in the first place. Writing helps me see where my mind is, and where it’s going. I write about what I find myself preoccupied with the most, and the more I write, the more I get to explore different avenues of being.
The third is… hm. I don’t know. Reconciliation? I’ve already reconciled with the people in my life. Holding grudges is not something I’m good at. Correction: Hold grudges for people in real life is something I’m not good at. But the past selves of those very real people that exist rent-free in my mind? Absolutely. I’ve tried in the past to stand my ground by not forgiving someone for something they’ve done to me. After a while, it got exhausting. I do not believe that I am a vengeful person by nature. I do not know if people are vengeful by nature. I think it’s easy for me to make that doubtful statement because unlike me, there are people out there who have been tormented and who have suffered at the hands of other people. I’m talking about people who were harmed very very very badly. I believe some of these individuals would probably be easily willing to make the claim that people are evil and vengeful by nature. Wow, the topic shifted. This whole morality talk is reminding me of The Good Place (tv show).
To make my stance a little less ambiguous, I believe that people are all good in nature, but that Allah swt has provided each and every one of us the capacity to do irreparable and unjustifiable harm to another. Free will, y’all.
All in all, seeking retribution for a perceived injustice is a pretty cumbersome venture. Especially when you’re seeking it from a version of a person who only exists in your mind. As Allah and His messenger advise, it’s better to forgive, dear reader. After all, don’t we all desire to be forgiven by Allah for our shortcomings and blatant sins? I’ve been on this road of hating fictional versions of real people in my mind, and I’ve now decided to stop right there, in the middle of the open road. As long as I breathe, I can stop.
I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to being who I was. Maybe I won’t, and that’s for the better. But I’ll miss those sweet days of naïveté. I’m here now, though, and I am who I am because of all the things that happened to me and the all things I’ve chosen to do afterwards. And it’s beautiful that I get to say “uuuummmm… sooo… this road I’m on isn’t looking good. It is also not feeling good. Maybe I should stop.” I’m fighting these bullies in my head because I haven’t fully actualized the fact that I control my own mind. I can just say no and stop. I can forgive these people I’ve been holding hostage in my mind for so long and choose to let go of them.