"It's never too late to be who you might have been." ~George Eliot
People say don't live in the past. That's good advice, but I don't think we should completely forget our past. All those trials and lesson you encounter have made you who you are now. I used to try to bury my past and completely shut it from my present memory. But lately, I've learned to embrace it and work it into the decisions I'm faced with at this time in my life. Your past can be a useful tool to build from. It can also be a good reference in times of hopelessness and weakness. We weren't given an instruction manual for life, but the past can be one that is left unfinshed.
I don't mean to say let's all focus on our pasts. What I mean is, we should continue to learn from it and refer to it as a guide in certain situations.
Personally, as someone who wasn't the best version of myself last year, I find comfort in this quote. To me it means that despite the mistakes and dark times I encountered last year, I can come back from it. The person I was proud of when I was 17, 18, 19 years old is not lost. I'm still her underneath the new experiences I have encountered. My direction hasn't changed, I just lost pieces of it.
At 17, writing and literature was my life. I wrote constantly. Yet, now at 21, I only write when school requires it. I could find that passion again. It's not lost. Just like my love of music isn't. At these ages I remember just sitting back and listening to songs that meant something to me and finding peace in them. It was a form of release for me and I gained a type of euphoria from the lyrics that made sense of the world. I have forgotten this euphoria.
It's aspects like these that make me nostalgic of this part of my life. It was my ability to find poetry in every day and put that poetry down on paper to make a story out of it. I don't miss the two bedroom apartment that overlooked the highway. I miss the girl behind those walls who found beauty in how rain dripped from the window ledge or how my mom moved her lips when she read.
I lost touch with my spirituality. And I don't mean religion. I mean my sense of the world around me and my ability to always find something beautiful about it. I miss the music behind a pen on paper creating words that came not from my mind, but my heart.
Nostalgia isn't a bad thing in my eyes. It reminds us of the people we want to be. And as Eliot says, it's never too late to find that poetry or music in my life. It's there in every moment of my life. I can still be that girl I might have been before I lost my way. And that's the most comforting thing of all.
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