How do we foster compassion for our former selves?

and should we?

Sometime after college, someone was showing me a picture of themself in middle school, and cringing at the sight. They were embarrassed about how they looked then, how they dressed then, basically just their whole vibe. I didn’t get it. They were looking at a picture of themself in middle school; of course the vibes were off. Dressing weird, acting weird, being weird all seems perfectly on track for middle school to me. Why be embarrassed by a version of yourself that was doing exactly what she was supposed to be doing? 

It’s easy for me to have compassion for my middle school self. High school is pretty easy, too. The temporal distance from those selves makes it easier to love them. It’s like looking at an early Mac from the 2000s: the qualities that make them so clearly outdated — their bulk and bright colors — are fascinating and even charming. 

Most of the time. 

It gets harder the closer the former self is to the current self. 

My friend has a tattoo of cherries on her wrist, which she recently told me she decided to remove. She had already begun the removal process, which will take several more years to complete. She has a lot of tattoos, maybe around twenty, and this one was a very early one. She doesn’t like the design anymore, she doesn’t like the reminder of who she was when she got the tattoo. So she’s removing it. 

When she first brought this up, I had an instinct to be like, but it’s okay, the self that got that tattoo is you, too! You don’t have to erase it; you have to love it. That’s what we’re supposed to do, right? We’re supposed to ultimately love all parts of ourselves, even the parts that feel irrelevant at best or simply wrong at worst? 

It’s one thing to have compassion for the self that wore weird clothes in middle school. It’s another to have compassion for the self that brings up feelings that go beyond a cringe or a chuckle. Feelings of, you know, shame, regret, bewilderment. That’s the self it’s harder to have compassion for — the self whose values you, for the most part, no longer share.

I see these former selves as eras (we’re all on our own personal Eras Tours aren’t we), which are easier to identify the older I get. One way to divide up these eras is by chronology: childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, etcetera. But another way, a way that is harder to track, is by, well, who you were. What you were like, what you cared about, what you valued. Perhaps there was the shy era, the anxious era, the outgoing era, the ambitious era, the existential era, the insecure era, etcetera. 

The era of me that I currently have the most difficulty fostering compassion for is my college era. I have very recently begun to see dynamics from that era that I didn’t see before. During that era, I felt those dynamics, or at least felt hints of them, but I didn’t see them. Now I see them.

In this case, I don’t feel that hindsight is 20/20; hindsight is having the rug pulled out from under you to reveal the floorboards were made of metal, which, it dawns on you, you always suspected. They were supposed to be wood — soft, grained, of the earth. 

The more I understand about this earlier version of myself, the more I wish I could talk to her. I want to sit down, face-to-face, and level with her. I want to talk to her until she understands and believes that she deserves better. I want to make her see herself as I see myself now. I want to shake her. I desire to relieve her suffering through forcing her to change. 

On the other hand, I could forgive her. I could tell her it’s alright, I understand why you did the things you did, I understand how you got here. The years after high school are a messy time for many people. Individuation is a chaotic process. 

The fear with forgiving the version of myself that suffered is that I will incur my own suffering again. That if I forgive myself, I accept my past suffering, and thereby accept that I could let it happen again. And I don’t want it to happen again. So mustn’t I hold myself accountable, rather than forgive? Mustn’t I be vigilant? 

Right after college, I was vigilant, though I didn’t know it. I didn’t know why. I was protecting myself from something I couldn’t articulate. Maybe you can’t really articulate an era until you’ve made it to the next one, or the one after that. 

I know I’m being kind of vague. That’s because I’m not ready to get more specific. Maybe I will later, maybe not. I’m hoping that even so, these ideas are resonating with you, readers. I’m hoping that you’re thinking of some era in your life that can be painful to reflect on, and it’s okay, you don’t have to go into detail. I think we all have former selves who made choices our current selves wouldn’t make. I think that’s called growing.

One thing is clear — I’ve aged out of both of these former selves. Somehow, by luck, by love, and by dint of will, I made it to the next era. I made it to me. I slithered out of the husk; by now that skin sheath has blown away in the wind. 

What happens to the former versions of ourselves, the ones that no longer house us?  

We grow, we change, we learn, we unlearn, we try, we give up, we connect with people, we lose people, we rewrite the stories, we misunderstand and understand each other and ourselves. Also, we spill coffee, we cry over it, we hold mugs in different ways to prevent spillage, we spill less frequently until one day we spill again, the mug shatters, we despair, we buy a new mug, or we have one less mug in the cupboard, until we get another mug, as a gift, from another person or from ourself, we stop drinking coffee, we switch to tea, we go back to coffee. We miss deadlines, we berate ourselves, we adhere to new deadlines. 

I do not want the the snake skin to float away. What I want is to catch it in the wind; to grind it in a mortar and pestle until it becomes powder; to mix that powder into tea and drink it, hot water inching down my esophagus and settling into my gut, its new home.