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Deal With Your Shit
For the sake of your future self (and those around you)
Have you ever noticed how many people are stuck in their pasts? How many people live as though they have a foot in the present and one way back there, years behind them? Particularly when these are negative experiences — being caught in a loop of talking about past positive experiences is an issue in itself. I see this in my work in mental health, as well as in my daily life, and it makes me want to scream it from the rooftops — Deal with your shit!
Our past experiences make us who we are. You wouldn’t be the person you are today without everything and anything that you’ve been through, big or small. We were all one flapping of a butterflies wing’s away from being someone else completely, after all.
It’s natural, healthy even, to reminisce. The important thing is to do so in small doses, and in a way that feels good. For too many people, events from five, ten, twenty years ago feel like they just took place, because they still talk about them every day. Even if you don’t have an older relative in your life who does this now, you’ll have met someone like that; every time you talk to them, they bring up tales of woe from long ago.
It might be the best friend who slept with their partner three decades ago, the colleague who betrayed them by…
