Make Peace with Your Past to Rediscover Your Authentic Self
Has the inability to make peace with your past hindered your journey toward
discovering your authentic self?
Thankfully, there are things you
can do today to start making peace with your past and create a future that
lets your authentic self shine through!
By Gregory Diehl
When you’ve reached the limits of what your starting conditions can offer you then you owe to yourself to break free from their walls. Move into the place where you see the world as full of internal possibilities.
This process begins with a sense of loss, but it doesn’t end there. With destruction come the seeds of creation – but only if you have the endurance to see the cycle through to the other side.
When you have embraced the loss of everything you once were, you will learn to see every situation from multiple angles. You will understand that there are infinite other ways to solve the same problems and infinite other problems with which to concern yourself.
But first, you need to make peace with your past. Here’s why that’s so important on your quest to reinvent yourself.
Make Peace With Your Past So You Can Destroy the Current Version of Yourself
To make peace with your past would destroy you – but it will make you psychologically invulnerable. You are freeing yourself from the dead past of tradition. The space it occupied is now empty. What you fill it with will determine the course of your life from that day forward.
Then you can rebuild your life in a new image, untethered to the chains of the past. You can arrange the variables of your own life to be specifically and personally appealing. To do this, you must know WHO you are and HOW you will react under different conditions.
You must rediscover yourself.
Make Peace with Your Past – Not Run Away from It
People who attempt to run away from their old life never get very far. Sure, they can easily get on a plane and be thousands of miles away in just a few hours.
However, they cannot easily alter the conditions instilled into them. They carry their primordial culture with them wherever they go, repeating its effects abroad.
They bring their past into the present, shaping the trajectory of their future. To rediscover your authentic self, you need to make peace with your past and free yourself from your own personal history. That – or forever remain a prisoner of who your early influences told you to be. It is the DNA of your recurring experience.
Your Past Doesn’t Have To Be Your Future
This is the hardest step for most. We hold onto our own personal past as sacred. It is what gives us our ultimate sense of self. It is the thing we are most terrified to lose.
We don’t know what we are without it, in the same way a prisoner locked away for long enough will forget what life looks like outside the limitations of his cell walls. The space between the death of the old and the birth of the new is the final frontier for everyone.
“No one can change past events. What needs changing is the constant reinterpretation of those events.”
People are so obsessed with what happened to them that they cannot tell the difference between the actual event and the recollection of it. When you tell your story, you pick apart the tiniest details from every possible moment which has contributed to your present being.
You Tell The History of How Things Came To Be
Who would you be right now, in this moment, if you were to instantly forget that story? How much of you is only there because of the things you continue to tell yourself about who you are?
Whatever remains true once you strip away all inherited behaviors is what really defines you. It’s also the only way to know what you really want from your existence.
Part of me has always thought that if the world found out what I really was, they would reject me. They were not ready for what I saw within me. I was tempted, for the longest time, to walk away from the human world and remain that way, on my own, until I expired. Certainly, I had already acquired the adaptability I would need to survive physically and spiritually.
What leaving the past behind looked like for me
I had grown completely comfortable with my own existence and did not fear isolation from my own kind. I saw no way for the person I was becoming to coexist with the world as I perceived it.
Similar sentiments have echoed endlessly in the past as individuals came into awareness of themselves. Many surely followed through with these notions to never again be heard from.
In my recent past, that ambition changed. Maybe I got stronger. It is possible I became more aware of what the problem was and I realized what I could do about it. One way or another, I reached the conclusion that I did have a place in the world.
I would still be something of an outsider – living on the fringe and doing things the way I wanted to – but I would not abandon the trappings of society. Indeed, all I have seen gives me a greater vantage place from which to plot my involvement in the world. I see better now what people need, and I know what I am equipped to provide.
I could not just accept whatever the easiest role life would offer me might be. Gregory Diehl had to be someone I could live with.
It was a matter of presenting myself as the kind of person the world could accept, but who would still push them to make progress. It became a balancing act of staying exactly one step beyond their complacency.
Too far would upset them, and not far enough would be benign. It took trial and error, experimenting with how the world would respond to different versions of me. What I found was that there was a type of person in a certain place in their life who would value what I offered very highly.
They would seek me out and hold onto me when they found me.
“It didn’t matter if I couldn’t change the world‘s larger problems. There was a specific domain where I could affect the way people think and act. That is where I would carve out my role in the narrative of life.”
Most importantly, I could do it without betraying the principles I now knew defined me – and in the world as it really is, however long that lasts.