Be An Adult For Once: Embrace Your Past

Everyone has a past, many of us have demons and I don’t know a single closet that doesn’t bare a skeleton or two, so why is it that some of us deny our past as if it never happened. 

I know someone who, at one point in time, didn’t have a job for nearly a year. She slept on the couch of a friend and was doing bad. She eventually found a decent call center job, lost it, then found another job a month or so later. It seemed that things were looking up for her. Unfortunately as things were looking up, she turned her nose up too. Everyone else was beneath her now that she had a little $12/hour job. Worst part is, she oddly has no recollection that she was jobless for a year and crashing on couches. Did her memory get erased? Bad case of amnesia? I call it a bad case of not growing up and an even worse case of deny, deny, deny. 

Your past is what makes your future, it’s what got you to the present. If you can’t learn from your past situations you’ll be recycling the same old bad behavior. That’s the case with my associate above. She finally got a job at a call center, lost it after a month, got another job and after a few short months there, she  packed her bags to move out of state (without having another job lined up and yet again, living off of someone else). They say you live and you learn, but if you deny you ever lived it, you’ll never learn from it. The worst part is not only does she deny it, she knows that we all know it happened, and she denies it to us. The people who were there when she couldn’t afford gas money. Why deny it to people you know were there?

Another example more familiar to everyone would be Draya’s story. No matter how many official documents were released, no matter what her mother has gone on the record as saying, no matter what we all know and how many times she’s be caught in a lie, she still denies the whole situation with her son ever happened. Not that it didn’t happen the way we think, but that it never happened at all.

Don’t get me wrong, you don’t owe anyone an explanation for anything in your life. Your issues are between you and God. But if you can’t be real for once in your life, things aren’t going to get easier. The best thing you can do is own up to life and change for the better. Learn from past situations and don’t make the same mistake twice. Take good advice, grow up mentally and physically. If you’re still doing the same thing you did a year ago, you’re doing something wrong.