Why is Past Me Always Screwing Over Current Me?
The roller coaster ride of blame.
It’s a conversation my sister and I often have via text message. She’ll send me something along the lines of, “Well, past me has done it again.”
Typically “past her” signed up for something she didn’t really want to do or said yes to attending some kind of an outing in the future. Only the future is now and past her doesn’t really seem all that sorry about how much that is messing up current her.
We joke with each other that past us doesn’t appear to have any feelings about future us and certainly doesn’t give a crap about current us. In fact they seem to play pretty hard and loose with the schedules and appointments for future us.
After all, what does past us care? They won’t have to deal with it.
And then there are the issues that past us got us into that we talk about pretty much only with therapists — ex-boyfriends and husbands and the like.
Good times.
It’s kind of our standard text message joke. Right up there with, “Hey, sis, there’s been a hoot owl howling outside my window for about six nights in a row. Think I should be on the lookout for a lady on a horse or something?”
Man, Wildfire is such a good song.
Sis and I live life about fifteen degrees off center and it’s made for some good laughs.
But recently I got to thinking about how hard we are on our past selves. We’ve sent each other some pretty vitriolic messages about what we think about our past selves as it relates to our current condition.
But is that really fair?
Our past selves are really only just living life. Maybe at the time, we thought that dinner invite would be fun. We couldn’t know or really predict that on the day-of we wouldn’t have had enough sleep the night before or work would have been the shit storm it had become.
Our past selves really don’t know what our current condition will be like, so should we really be so hard on them?
The decisions our past selves made were based on what was happening to them in the moment they lived. They can’t know what our current selves will be going through.
But, I have to admit, there are times when I would really like to shake the living hell out of past me for the decisions she’s made in terms of significant others.
I want to say, “Nice job, doofus. Couldn’t you figure out that he was going to duck and run?”
But see, the thing is, past me didn’t have the benefit of hindsight like current me does. Sure, it’s really easy to look back on something and realize exactly where everything went wrong. That’s the advantage of Monday morning quarterbacking, so to speak.
When I was growing up, my mother was absolutely brilliant at this. If I had a nickel for the number of times she would start a sentence with, “You know what you should have done?” I would be ten years retired by now.
It got to the point where in my mind I would sarcastically quip, “No, great swami, I have no idea what I should have done because I’m just as dumb now as I was then. Why don’t you enlighten me?”
Naturally, I didn’t actually say that out loud, but it sometimes felt kind of good to think it.
People at work do this damn near all the time. After something happens, I’ve got a line at my office door of bosses and co-workers telling me how it should have been handled.
Geniuses. Every one.
If it drives me crazy when other people do it to me, why am I okay with doing it to my past self?
Is it because sometimes I feel desperate to blame someone?
Blame is one shady character. When bad things happen, that loaded finger of accusation wants to point somewhere, right?
For some reason, I have a much easier time of blaming myself than I do other people. That quivering finger turns right to my own chest and that stupid voice in my head says, “This one’s on you, kid. Way to go.”
Hence, past me takes an awful lot of beatings.
If I’m ahead of the game and really on my toes, sometimes it’s current me that takes the hit.
Recently, my acupuncturist said to me, “What if no one is to blame at all? What if everyone in the situation had a role to play at that moment in time because lessons were supposed to be learned?”
There is no blame. Words were said. Actions were done. It simply is.
Ugh, right? Don’t you want to pull your hair out sometimes when things just make sense like that?
That’s the toddler in me throwing a tantrum, though. Sometimes I let her. She’s not a bad kid.
But eventually, I know I have to pull up my big-girl panties and step back into the adult role and realize that yeah, my acupuncturist has a point. Blame doesn’t really solve much of anything and it certainly doesn’t really help in letting things go.
I’m starting to think, as Ellen Degeneres tells us at the end of every show, that life really is about kindness.
Kindness to others AND kindness to self.
Sometimes the greatest kindness is the one we give ourselves because as I’ve heard and read and witnessed, when we begin with ourselves, the gesture extends to others.
So for as fun as it is to joke via text with my sister about our past selves screwing us over, maybe the better idea is to realize that she was just doing what was right for her at the time.
Maybe instead of browbeating her, we treat her with a little kindness.
What if we talked just a little nicer to ourselves? What if we took blame completely out of the game and just let life unfold as it is doing?
Could a simple shift in thinking in one person’s life change the world?
The older I get, I’m starting to think it really could.
So, to my past self, I say, here’s a nice glass of wine, a warm blanket and a book. Settle in, dear one, and give yourself a break.
From here on out, I’m sure going to try to.
