Rewritting History
Rewritting your history isn’t so much about erasing what your history was. It’s more about identifying with different aspects of your history to become someone who uses their history in that differentiated way. The version of you that reconsiders and retells what happened to them from an intentionally differentiated perspective is using their rewritten history to support who they’re becoming as opposed to you using your rehashed history to negate who you are or who they are to become, which is also who you’re becoming.
“The Are” and “The Now” are such ephemeral moments. By allowing yourself to rewrite your history to tell a story that better supports who you are in “The Now” or who you are becoming, you are simply accepting—as existential canon—that you do, in fact, get to change. You are accepting that change is the thing that makes you eternal. You are accepting that change is the thing that makes the Universe eternal.
Because change is ALL WAYS going to reconceptualize, re-coordinate and reconfigure the ways that people interact. What is and what is potentially to happen is always tentative in a butterfly effect kind of way. Change changes things and so whenever there is a change of ANY KIND it creates completely new presents, completely new histories and completely new futures because of how that change changes everything else that encounters it. And then we all change in our own slight or obvious ways as a domino effect or a butterfly effect.
Rewritting your history—as actually necessary and called for by the identity that you identify with from in “The Now”—is about the now moment and any current choice to change. The choice to remember yourself differently. Re-membering. Reconfiguring the historically recognized members of your identity: which are past versions of you and moments of you that you are holding above others because of how you identify with them. But you’re not holding those particular memories of you above all others because any outside force can require you to think of yourself in any particular way.
Certainly, you can be conditioned into particular ways of thinking; but you cannot be required—from an internal narrator perspective—to think differently about yourself unless you consent to do so because you’re the one who ULTIMATELY controls your thinking. You of “The Now” has the final say.
Furthermore, even when your thinking is conditioned . . . it’s still yours. It’s your conditioned thinking, which is different than another person’s conditioned thinking. Because you have different lived experiences, epigenetics, histories and perspectives, even your conditioned thinking cannot be identical. Regardless of if you have learned to regurgitate the same things in the same manner.
What lies within the opportunity of rewriting my history is the (developed) ability to identify with different memories of myself that allow me to give myself permission to be differently from NOW ON. Which means that, with practice that I have developed over time, I can become a different person who is different in the ways they remember themselves overall and period.
And what’s the benefit of that practiced development? Less regret, less living in the past, less inaction and more authenticity, more presence and more enjoying your lives. Giving to each version of yourself what each version of yourself deserves. And being in alignment with what is happening and what “needs” to happen and what you prefer to happen. Striking while the “Iron is hot” so there’s the least mortification of the flesh. Making the most out of yourself and the most out of your time.
It’s really about appreciating the progress on the micro level as well as the macro level. The macro level would be “it’s this and it’s that.” The micro level would be, “it’s this and this and this and that and that and that and this and this and this, etc.”
You as the home of yourself and you as the home of your identity. Your being, your personhood.
The memory that you’re creating of yourself is being woven together through all those moments that define THAT idea of you. Even those memories are not complete. Those moments that you recall are only from a particular version of you’s point of view. Your memory doesn’t include every angle, every perspective, or every narration about how each person or thing in the memory has arrived there.
Rewritting history isn’t about ethically bypassing or even spiritually bypassing what you have done. It’s about saying,
“Okay, I think that that version of me did a very embarrassing/fucked up/regrettable thing. This version of me knows that’s how I feel about it now. Thanks to that version of me for taking a major fucking L so that this version of me could come to this realization. And now that I have the realization that that version of me is no longer who I care to identify with, how will I use that memory of me to never repeat that version of me’s mistakes again (to the best of my ability)? AS I CAN HELP IT, HOW CAN I HELP IT FROM HERE? FROM NOW? FROM WHO I AM IN ALL ITS COMPLEXITY AND THROUGH ALL MY JUDGEMENT?”
Or you can ask yourself, “what did I learn from that version of me that I otherwise wouldn’t have learned at that time and that place?”
Once you have your answer for that FROM WHO YOU ARE TODAY, you can consider that the entire purpose of the experience. That you learned something from it that you otherwise would not have learned at that time and that place.
And though judging that about yourself may seem “logical,” your judgment WILL NOT CHANGE THE L THAT THAT VERSION OF YOU HAD TO TAKE.
HOWEVER, you can retell the narrative from a place of greater growth and grace. You can say to yourself, “that me burned a lot of bridges ignorantly so that this version of me never has to burn a bridge unnecessarily AGAIN.”
Then—this is the whole whopping magic trick of the whole circumstance—once you’ve done all of the above TO THE BEST OF YOUR ABILITY . . . YOU ACTUALLY HAVE TO LET THAT/IT BE OKAY. You need to let go of the judgment, the insistence and the controlling tendencies. You need to let go of the helicopter narrator. You need to let go of the unreliable story. All so you can become a more reliable narrator. One who takes you on journeys you actually want to be on and that actually reflect back what you believe you’re doing.
Once you’ve done that, you can truly move forward with compassionate consideration. And that, my friends, is called peace of being.
