The past doesn't need me, "now" does.

Avoiding nostalgia. Centring presence.

How I loved the past. With all of its pain and reminiscing. The “work” required me to live in it, bring it back up, spend time questioning and lingering in its graveyard of sour-sweet memories. I was desperate to know it, like I didn’t know it the first time. Too young to be able to intellectualise it. I desired to understand it. Hunted the past down, in hopes it would explain who I was now. Always going back.

It changed me. All of that time-travelling into my soul. I know what ingredients of truth, trauma, experience and ancestry have build-a-beared me into existence. I know what beliefs, fears and doubts I’ve carried on my shoulders like tote bags with too much cheese and bottles of non-alcoholic fizz. I understand the roots and origins of them. I’ve twisted the past around in my guts, ruminated on it in the interior of my skull, and given birth to it all in my journal and actions.

Over the past decade, I’ve dedicated myself to it. I’ve done EMDR. Internal Family Systems. Cord-cutting. Akashic records. Deep meditation. Ceremonies. Rituals. Cacao. Breathwork. Therapy. So, much therapy. Lived in it all, integrated and expressed it in the real world. I’m proud of it. I’m proud of my willingness to knock on doors that would have been easier left shut. I live in compassion for myself for the breakdowns, grief, and depression that surfaces when we invite in the past to teach us. I praise myself for surviving. I survived feeling the pain that my body was too young to feel in the past, by choosing to relive it years later.

All of this past-hunting. All of this work. It’s part of who I am. It allows resilience to live in my chest. A softness that swims in my blood, that only exists once you’ve been broken into pieces, made a puzzle out of, then piece yourself back together to create a new shape. I recommend “the work”, even if it is indeed not for everyone. I think it could change the world, I truly do. It births a freedom for us to exist fully, in the here and now, when we spend some time understanding where we have come from. We are so influenced by the past, and the audacity of it not only being our past, but our ancestral past. Our collective past.

I still dabble in the past from time to time. When new life situations present themselves to me, the past comes up for air, letting me know it’s still there. Reminding me that this situation may be new, but those remnants of what once was, are still influencing how this situation might look. I give it time. I give it space. I listen. I’m patient with it. I allow myself to flirt with the past for a moment. I write about it and speak about it. Then, I ask myself, “where am I right now?” and where I am is not there. I am here. I can let the past inform it, but I won’t allow the past to impact it.

When we’re new to the work, or in the trenches of the work, then of course, the past takes up a lot of space. It needs our attention. If you’re in that right now, I salute your bravery. If we’re dedicated to a life of growth and healing, then yeah, the work doesn’t stop, it changes form. A spirit of self-inquiry stays with us. The desire to know ourselves more deeply. To be in more conscious relationships. Allowing embodiment to be our middle names. It’s beautiful. The past will always be there, more viscerally for some of us than others.

The present moment has always been at the top of my agenda. I know it holds power like nothing else, for it is all there is. Yet, the past as a means to fully understand my role in the present, was right up there too. I respect the past, but it doesn’t get to have all of me anymore. When I made that decision, a lightness entered me that language can’t even justify.

I have no business with building a house in the past. I’m not interested in trying to make ‘what was’, something else. Regret, I don’t know her. Mistakes, absolutely not. What needs all of me, is now. The past has already had its way with me. Living with CPTSD isn’t exactly in my control, I have no say in the matter when I’m lying in bed and a crushing memory bursts into my awareness. It rarely happens now, much thanks to EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing), making a soft hum out of what was unbearable to remember. Alongside, the other aforementioned work, for which I will always be filled with gratitude.

Other than that, the things I can control, I do. I let my memories live within me. I’ve been clearing out the detritus of things I took screenshots of and never looked at again, from my camera roll. I absolutely refuse to pay more rent to iCloud on a phone I supposedly own, and was encouraged to utilise. You convinced me to take 19,000 photos on my phone, Apple, with that flashy little camera, and now I must pay? Rude. Anyway, on my deleting spree, I was undoubtedly hit by the sweetness of what I once lived in.

Those precious days springing back into my mind, text messages I’d saved, feathered friends, thousands of trees apparently, the people I love, meals shared, the art I sat with. It has been such an enriching way of honouring the last few years. During this, realised that there’s such a difference between the big stuff and the little stuff of the past.

The big stuff can of course be the shit things. It’s also the milestones. It’s also encapsulated in that word “nostalgia”, the feeling that can be induced from listening to early 2000’s songs that you still remember the lyrics to. Watching the Barbie film and remembering the dolls whose hair you cut off for no good reason. Joining an online queue for hours to get tickets to see Oasis on tour again. Being excited by Lindsay Lohan’s comeback because of Mean Girls and The Parent Trap. We like the past. The past sells. We buy perfumes because the scent reminds us of something. A night in a smoky New York City bar. A lover’s sweater. Sticky SPF on sun-blasted shins. Plates of Grandma’s sugar cookies.

We romanticise the past when the present feels lacking in shimmer and expectation. We pretend that our exes, “weren’t that bad”, now that time has elapsed and with it, much of the truth. We act as if the time before we had our phones was all la-la-la and braiding grass, as if our fellow kids weren’t mean as hell. We say, “they don’t make music like they used to”, as if our Spotify isn’t filled with more current songs than we can ever listen to.

Not to mention the shadow side of the “good old days”. Brexit as an excuse for returning to the Britain of yore. Make America Great Again, pretending to do the same. Sometimes I wonder if this nostalgia that certain people speak of, is just a longing for a time when everyone who isn’t a white straight man didn’t have a voice, and wasn’t so visible. They’re not exactly reminiscing about ration books, brutalism, and The Great Depression while they’re benefitting from next day deliveries and online banking. There’s a dark side to nostalgia that exists within all of its fluffy Tamagotchi-having light.

The big stuff of the past also includes the rare moments in life that are so few and fleeting yet hold so much prominence. The weddings. Babies. Moving house. Making new friends and lovers. Travelling. Illness. Death. Hospital stays. New jobs. Losing jobs. Love and grief in all its abundance. The stuff that stays with us. Holds our focus. Makes us live in it long after it dissipates.

What I’m interested in, is the little stuff of the past. The stuff sleeping in the camera roll until you clear it out. The random dinner I ate on 23rd July 2023. The neighbourhood cat I took a photograph of yesterday at 12:31pm. The cactus I witnessed doing its thing on 14 March in California. Linking arms with my friend and eating croissants, after our gallery date on 7 December 2023. Jumping in puddles on a Tuesday. Reading my book by the river, in September.

That’s all the past needs of me now, because these moments remind me of the beauty I get to experience now. The moments that are so delicious to me that I want to reside in them. The moments that the present moment grasps and wraps me in.

I want to see the past as a collection of these little things that I lived in for the entirety of whatever day it happened on. The day I had never met until it came to greet me. The day I savoured. The day I then let go of to give my attention to the next day. Those moments we mistakenly label as the in-between days in life. I don’t want to spend the preciousness of my days now, dwelling in what once was, I want to respect the sanctity of being given a new day. It’s not granted to all of us. We wake each day, where around 150,000 people took their last breath. Yesterday, doesn’t need all of our attention.

I owe it to life to be in its nucleus each day. Overcome by it. Tasting it. Letting it stay on my tongue. I want to be here for all of it. The past doesn’t need me anymore. It had me. It had all of me in my presence, when it was first there. I want to give this moment that. How many days escape us because we spent them either in longing or lingering? I don’t want to stay in thoughts of things that have already happened, wishing past things into the void or trying to change them, when I can’t. It doesn’t need me.

The best way I can honour the past is by letting it slip away into today. Today is all that needs me. Today.