Thursday, September 30, 2010

No Imprint

A person's past is full of moments. Moments of splendor, love, excitement and treasure. For me, however, the shape my memory takes most often is the invisible toxic spectre of regret. I blame myself for so many things in the past, anger, self-righteousness, ignorance,and most of all, failure.
I often look through the window of my mind's landscape and wonder who that person was. How could this monster have been me? How could I have been so misled, so wrong?
In those moments I am overwhelmed by a thousand parasitic entities of shame, I lose all faith in myself, hope is squeezed out of the future, and I find myself in a kind of unshakable shock.
"Is all this mess I've created, is this what I was born for? To destroy, to hurt, to fail?"
I want to bang on that window, tell a hundred different past versions of myself to change, change before it's too late!
I want to save them from the complete lack of meaning I'm experiencing now.
And yet, I can't go back. I can change nothing in that past, so why do I so often find myself at that window.
I think the answer is simple, I can't forgive myself. I can't show myself mercy.
I'm struggling to learn to live in the now, to not transport my conciousness into expectations of what tomorrow should be, or demons of yesterday that I never should have been.
I'm trying to get to a place where I need nothing. Where I have no fantasies or hope. A place where I simply am. No identity, no voice, a shape that exists without imagination. A shape that leaves no imprint.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

My past almost ate me, too. I wanted for so long to disavow the person I had been. I couldn't forgive myself either.

I don't know what the answer is, but I decided that the fact that I do have regret, that I can feel shame for my past, is itself a blessing. For me its been a point of leverage for being a better person in the present.

And since I can't go back in time and kick my own ass, I am just trying not to be the kind of person right now that I will regret having been 10 years from now.

Now is all we have. Now and all the things that it can be.