Over the past couple of days, instead of writing, I’ve been trawling through my old notes, text files, and journal entries. It started out randomly flipping through my current journal, reading some past few entries out of curiosity, but then it continued.

I would pick a page at random and then skim it, grimacing or chuckling to myself. Some of the things that I had written down were no longer worries or concerns. Other items were still floating around in my head, sometimes for the same reasons, sometimes for different reasons. Ultimately, it was still fresh enough in my memory that I knew exactly what I was feeling in those moments.

Then the entries started to get older. I was reading some text files that I had saved from last year when I noticed I felt a genuine level of disgust. A bit of revulsion. The person who was writing these items was someone whom I didn’t like hearing from. He wasn’t a bad person, but I now looked back with chagrin. I felt the fullness of regret.

A side note now about regret. I have gone back to therapy to tackle some rising anxiety. My therapist has been encouraging me to think about radical acceptance, the idea of accepting everything that came before and allowing myself to live in reality. You can’t be present if you are too busy thinking about the past. Then, while talking to a friend, she mentioned that if she were to go back to moments in her life, she would still make the same choices.

This really messed with me, but then, after a bit more conversation, I realized she meant that she was making the best choices she could have at every point in her life. Therefore, she wasn’t regretful the way I was, she was doing her best and learning from mistakes. Sure, if she had better information, she might have made a different choice, but she didn’t, so why beat herself up?

This perspective hit home, hard. My therapist’s words blended with hers as new understanding dawned. I had unlocked a completely new lens to view my past with, a lens that was gentler and more forgiving. I could look back on the past me with compassion.

I continued to dig through old scraps of writing: forgotten memories that I had written down in a desperate attempt to understand my own mind. Looking all the way back to 2019, I was shocked as I came across photos I thought had been deleted but had been saved still. Normally, thinking back to those years, my heart would harden. Anger, bitterness, and sadness would well up. I was pleased that, as I scrolled through these artifacts, my face never contorted into grimaces. Instead, I felt my heart fill with compassion for the person in the past who wrote these things.

And the things were filled with hurt, sadness, anger, bitterness, anxiety, depression, ennui, and all sorts of desperation at needing the future to be better than that current moment.

The funny thing is that the me who is writing this now, I had mostly forgotten all those little moments that I had decided to write down. The things that I once held so dearly as my truth and my values had sloughed away.

It reminded me of another thing that my therapist had said: that projecting so far into the future denies me the ability to adjust my values as I live. In my own excavation of those digital memories, I realize how right that is. The application of my old values would no longer be right in my life. The paths I have taken were shaped by each moment before; each time, I was growing.

So, of course, I would not make the choices I made in the past if I were asked to make them now. I’ve (finally) realized that this revelation is simply just growth. Slow, steady growth.