idealising the past and dreaming about the future
Last week, after I made the blog public, I received some pretty beautiful messages. Most of them were from folks who had been in the exact same position as me, whether living with depression or anxiety, or simply finding it tough battling through life’s disappointments. It was incredibly comforting knowing what I believed when I wrote that last post was so resonant; we’re all going through the same bullshit.
But a friend in particular, his name is Mat. He commented publicly on my post with some words that got me thinking. Imma share this here:
If I was arrested for any crime at all it would be for idealising my past self. That and eating too many biscuits. Who I was, who I thought I was. I laughed more, I cared less, I subscribed to nobody else’s version of me. But then I got depressed and worried all the time, and I lost that part of myself. The happy-go-lucky, ball of energy, motivated, determined young woman, gone. As slow and as unnervingly noticeable as a fart.
Much in the way that Mat reminisces over his “extroverted, confident ‘me’“, I reminisce heavily upon the teenage me, the one who had stars in her eyes and never wavered in her confidence of her abilities.
Except, when I really think about it, when I’m honest with myself, and I face my self in the mirror, I know that isn’t true.
All that I’ve lost, really, are my rose tinted glasses.
I was never motivated, I was never determined. I was lucky. I can’t reminisce about the person I was because I know more about myself now than I did before, and I think the hardest part of climbing out of the pit of your mental un-health is accepting that life goes forwards, not backwards. I can’t unlearn all the things I’ve learnt since I noticed three years ago that I wasn’t happy. The truth is, I was unhappy before that. I’ve been fighting off that frequency sadness for as long as I can remember.
So I can’t go back and rewind the clock, because all I have is now and I don’t want to be that sad girl anymore.
I’ve been thinking a lot about cycles, the 7-year-life cycle in particular. Wait, though- Before you flick back to whatever you were doing before you decided to read my blog, bear with me. Aside from whatever spiritual or philosophical connotations the idea might have, let’s look at it logically for a second.
The first seven years of our life we spend smelling and touching and feeling out the world around us. Any mental learning is done almost subconsciously, depending on how our world treated us. We’re well on our way to becoming a real, pubescent adult when the second cycle rolls around, by which point we’re discovering our sexuality, relationships, viewpoints and intellect. This is such a huge exploratory phase for some. Then the third arrives, and we’re beginning to find out what the world is like without our parents driving the train. We’re figuring out where we place in the grand scheme of things, and wondering how you might change, politically, environmentally, socially. And then come our twenties.
I think it is no coincidence that a lot of people suffer mental illness for the first time in this particular age bracket. I envy those who don’t. They tend to be some of the most driven, strongest people I know. But my friends used to call it “the mid-twenties fear.” Out of nowhere, we’re mentally and physically culpable for all our own decisions and mistakes, and all the ideas we had for life in those first three cycles have become somewhat buried under a pile of work deadlines, rent days and bills to pay. We don’t own your own home yet, we aren’t married, we have no kids. We aren’t in the perfect job yet, we haven’t even begun the successes that were supposed to come to us after we put in so much work at our GCSE’s, A-Levels, degrees!
We’re the guy cleaning our toilets now, we’re the ones buying the food. School didn’t prepare us (not in the UK at least) for how to deal with every day responsibilities; how to pay taxes, how to arrange loans, how to mentally cope with the resounding disappointment we feel at how our lives panned out in contrast to the grand ideals we had when we were in our third cycle.
(I have a big problem with how out-dated our education system is; instead of being career-driven, it is goal-driven. Degrees don’t work for everyone and they evidently do not provide for a stable economy. More apprenticeships, less pressure on exams (not everyone is good at those) and more practical applications, pls & thnx)
But here’s what I’ve realised. Life is a cycle. It’s not meant to go backwards, it’s supposed to continue on its round, picking up what we’ve learned and adapting itself as it goes. Why focus on what we haven’t got when we should focus on what we do have? And if something is ever spiralling, ever changing and evolving, how can we go back to the last cycle? Should we jam an iron rod in the spokes, forcing the wheel to brake suddenly and collapse under the pressure? Because that is what would happen. That is what happened to me.
I knew at the age of 18 my life wasn’t heading in the right direction, when I stared out of my university accommodation window at York Minster in the distance, listening to Stop This Train by John Meyer. The night was dark, and I sat curled on my redundant desk chair, wondering in a pale blue light of sadness, even then. Eventually I made the change, dropping out of further education and pursuing my joy, my music. But it did not alleviate the sadness. I continued on, all the while so scared of living life on my own, so scared of growing up. I lived in fear for years of never achieving my goals because I could not bear to be alone doing it. Isolation was my motivation and fear my hinderance.
I spent years dreaming and idealising this vision of the future where I was always winning, where I was singing and performing and recording and I was writing with everyone and everyone wanted to write with me, and everything was just going to work out (claps between words required). It was easier living in this fantasy life I wanted to build, but the escape was taking me further away from reality. Much like that incredible Pixar film, Inside Out, fear and sadness was in control of my actual life.
Things were going well for a while in that frame of mind, but then they didn’t.
When all those things I’d dreamt (I stress that I never visualised them, not in a positive way- I dreamed them- the difference is as vast as an ocean) didn’t happen, I kept harking on to that past self, wondering where it all went wrong, trying to get back that ambition, the endless streams of excitement, the riveting pangs of desire. It was all a lie I told myself. Because really, all I had in the pit of my stomach was dull and and grey; it was nothing, and I could feel myself hiding in that pit, far, far away from where I used to be. All of what I told myself was a lie, and I was starting to realise the truth of it.
I think that amidst all of it, life was telling me (whatever it was; nature, God, Buddha’s mates,) I ought not to hyper-admire my old self. Because in trying to become my past self, I was ignoring what I could become in the future. All of the little lies I told myself started to evolve on their own like that black icky shit from Prometheus (don’t watch it- it’s disappointing, just like your life), to the point that I forgot what I had done to protect myself; when all of those things I had lied with were stripped from me, I was naked and bare, and I had no idea of how I was going to move through the murk of it all. My self esteem was so low that the idea of performing made me anxious, writing made me cry, I sat in silence at the piano with a choke in my throat and my guitar lay in its case gathering dust.
But I was naked for a reason. I had to accept that I was relying heavily upon this idea of my self, not upon what I was. I was constantly seeking others’ approval, my only source of validation was what I thought others thought of me.
It has been empowering to know that the answer has been in me all along. I cannot blame others for how I view myself.
Life is a cycle. I am where I am supposed to be now. It’s not perfect, I’m still working on me and creating my life with my own hands, not someone else’s. I’m not quite there yet, but I’m trying.
But maybe this is my best self, because I’m so much more aware and emotionally awake. Maybe I’m the best I can be because I recognised my laziness and arrogance when I needed to, and in stripping these things away from my ego I am looking forward to being a better person, not the young complacent girl I was. And as a woman, cycles rule our lives. From the second cycle to the latter, our emotions and physiology is run by a monthly turn of events. Part of the reason I came off the pill was so that I could feel and trust this more purely. I was neglecting my basic instincts and self and I couldn’t have jacked up hormones hiding it away from me.
So everything comes and goes. The old girl goes and the new woman arrives. We have a chance to change every time. All aspects of life in this world run in a cycle. Water, fire, earth. It all moves and works in a cycle. Ice ages, the rising of dough into a beautiful donut, the melting of butter atop a mountain of cheese and jacket potato. Life and death. All the important stuff.
So I let the death of my old self instigate the birth of a better me. And one day I might shed this skin too and look forward to the next husk I inhabit.
What I’m learning is that nostalgia can be good, if you’re with your mates and remembering that time you threw up down the side of George Ezra’s tour van (true story).
But if we start becoming nostalgic about our selves, thinking of our current self in a negative way, dousing it in low light and bad reflective gear, and instead highlighting that past self with the glory light of hindsight, we can’t, and I believe, we won’t move forward.
We have to accept ourselves as we are now, and then build whatever we can upon the foundations that we create every second we’re alive. Because all we have are our own decisions, that ultimately we are in control of. How we respond, how we act, what we say; at the end of the day, that’s who we are. What you did today, that’s who you are, good or bad. No-one is perfect and life is a cycle. We always have tomorrow to try again.
We don’t have yesterday, so
