Why You Need To Stop Beating Yourself Up Over Your Past

It’s not your fault.

It was never your fault because you were always doing the best that you could. You’re human after all. We all are, and we’re all just trying to dream and survive, survive and dream.

Your past may have broken you, but it has also fixed you if you are still reading this, if you are still here. You are a monument of moments and memories strung together to construct the rare, imperfect yet beautiful thing that is uniquely you.

Your story is yours alone. No one can possibly understand the depths of who you are by a superficial judgment, a cursory glance, a glimpse of a phase in the entirety of your life.

It’s not your fault that someone didn’t treat you right because they didn’t know any better. They didn’t know how to love, and they were blind to their own shortcomings. Forgive them, and pray that one day they will experience the beauty and magic of unconditional love towards themselves and others.

It’s not your fault that you failed at something because you didn’t know any better. You tried something you hadn’t done before, and it didn’t work. There are million different ways something can fail, and there are a million different ways something can succeed.

It’s not your fault that you left behind all the hearts that could’ve loved you because you didn’t know any better. If you had seen them for who they were, if you had known what they were capable of, you would’ve stayed long enough to realize it.

It’s not your fault that your life was hard or difficult because you can’t control the cards you were dealt with. We all have our own battles to face because we’re all here to learn something different. We simply cannot compare and measure each one’s pleasure and pain.

It’s not your fault if you couldn’t fix something or save someone because you didn’t know any better. We all try to cope with our pain the best way we can. Sometimes we have support, and sometimes we don’t. You can’t change people or even yourself because it is only the past that has the power to do that.

Your past is not your fault, but it is now your responsibility. You can’t go back in time, but you do get a second chance. Your past can only be understood by perspective, which you have in this present moment.

You can choose to tell yourself the story of your past kindly, and with forgiveness towards yourself. You can choose to learn from it, rather than berate and beat yourself up over your own mistakes and those of others. You can choose to develop empathy and compassion and judge other people less harshly. You can choose to see how subjective the human mind really is, and how we don’t really know the reasons people do what they do, why they are the way they are, and how complex they can really be.

You can choose to leave the wreckage of your past behind, and focus on how it has built and made you into who you are today. Your past lives on within you, but it also changes and dies with you, depending on what you do with it.

You can choose to be better than your past because now you know better.