Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to have had a completely linear, almost boring life. No dramatic chapters, no experiences that left permanent fingerprints, no relationships that taught me to question myself, no losses that changed the way I attach, no moments that rewired the way I see safety, love, rejection, abandonment, trust or danger. Just life. Something happens, I experience it, I respond to it and then it stays where it belongs: in the past. I think that sounds wonderfully simple, but life doesn’t really work that way, you know? 

The past has a strange habit of showing up in the present without knocking. Sometimes it arrives as a reaction that seems disproportionate to what is actually happening. Someone doesn’t answer a message and suddenly the silence feels bigger than it should. Someone becomes distant for a moment and your mind starts filling in the blanks. Someone says something completely innocent, but something inside you tightens. You know, rationally, that this is not that, but your nervous system doesn’t always speak in rational language, it remembers.

And suddenly you aren’t only responding to what is happening now. You’re responding to what happened before, what you feared might happen, what once happened to someone else, or what you learned a long time ago to protect yourself from. The present becomes a stage and the past quietly changes the script. The strange thing about triggers is that it isn’t necessarily a sign that something is wrong in the present. Sometimes it’s simply a sign that something old has been touched and that distinction matters, I would say, because when an old wound gets activated, our first instinct can be to investigate the present as if it caused the feeling.

Why did they say that? Why did they behave differently? What does this mean? Is something changing? Should I be worried?

Suddenly the brain has opened a full investigation based on one tiny piece of evidence. Mine is particularly talented at this. Give my brain one ambiguous sentence and it can produce twelve possible interpretations, three historical parallels and a moderately convincing disaster scenario before I’ve finished my coffee. The older I get, the more I understand that we don’t enter new relationships, new experiences or new chapters as blank pages. We arrive carrying ourselves and our history comes with us. The child we once were, the relationships we survived, the people we lost, the things we learned about love, the ways we learned to protect ourselves, the disappointments, the moments when trusting someone hurt, the moments when trusting ourselves was the only thing that kept us going. All of it becomes part of the lens through which we see. Sometimes that lens is useful, it makes us perceptive, it can make us compassionate, it can help us recognise patterns and protect ourselves. But sometimes the lens becomes so familiar that we forget we’re wearing it.

We mistake our interpretation for reality, fear for intuition, familiarity for truth and we react to today’s person with yesterday’s emotional vocabulary. The paradox here is the part I struggle with most: I wouldn’t necessarily want to erase the things that shaped me, because all that made me who I am. The difficult chapters gave me strength, loss gave me perspective, disappointment taught me boundaries, having to rebuild taught me that I can rebuild, being hurt taught me how deeply I can love. Even the parts of myself I sometimes find exhausting (the analysing, the questioning, the constant attempt to understand myself and everyone around me) didn’t appear out of nowhere. They developed for a reason. So I don’t want to become someone who has never been hurt. I want to become someone who doesn’t have to keep reliving the hurt in order to stay safe. Perhaps healing is not forgetting, it isn’t about becoming completely unaffected, it isn’t about reaching some enlightened state where nothing triggers you and you float through life serenely, drinking herbal tea and understanding everyone’s behaviour perfectly. Maybe healing is much more ordinary, like noticing: Oh, this feeling is very big. Is it actually about what is happening right now? Or did something old just walk into the room? And then allowing yourself a moment before reacting. A moment to separate memory from reality,  to remember: This person is not that person. This relationship is not that relationship. This moment is not that moment. And perhaps most importantly: I am not the same person I was then either. 

There is something incredibly unfair about making the present pay for the past. We can do it without even realising, we can expect new people to prove they won’t hurt us because someone else did, we can look for signs that history is repeating itself, we can test, withdraw, overanalyse, control, anticipate, protect. In trying so hard not to be hurt again, we sometimes prevent ourselves from fully experiencing what is actually happening. That’s the tragedy of it. The past was supposed to teach us how to live, not prevent us from living. So I’m trying to learn a different kind of awareness. Not “How do I make sure this never hurts?”, but: “Can I trust myself to handle whatever happens?”

That feels very different because safety doesn’t come from knowing that nothing bad will ever happen again. Perhaps safety comes from knowing that whatever happens, I will still have myself. And maybe that’s what it means to finally let the past have its place, not erased, not denied, not romanticised. Just… behind me. Close enough to remember, far enough away that it doesn’t get to drive.