Tonight is one of those nights again.
I’m having trouble sleeping, and my mind has wandered back to things that happened long ago. I find myself quietly wishing they had never happened.
Not desperately. Not with the kind of anguish that once consumed me. Just a little sadness, a little regret, and the familiar thought that I wish things had been different.
I imagine the past as a collection of scars on my body. Some are barely noticeable. They aren’t particularly deep or prominent, but they’re there.
And why wouldn’t they be?
We’re not newborn babies anymore, untouched by life. We’ve lived, made mistakes, lost things, hurt others, been hurt ourselves, and gone through experiences we never asked for.
No matter how much we heal, how could we possibly return to being people who have never experienced any of it?
Our memories aren’t computer files we can simply delete. We cannot erase an entire chapter of our lives just because we no longer wish to carry it.
And I’ve stopped trying to put healing cream on every scar.
Some scars will remain, no matter how much we wish they would disappear. So I let them be. I don’t pick at them. I don’t resent their existence. I simply look at them sometimes and remember the stories behind them.
And yes, some of those stories still make me sad.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
We don’t have to be devastated by a memory for it to remain a sad memory. We don’t have to be consumed by regret to wish we’d made a different choice. And we don’t have to turn every painful experience into a beautiful lesson just to justify having gone through it.
Not every scar needs to become a masterpiece. Not every painful experience needs a greater meaning.
Some things were mistakes. Some things were unfortunate. Some things happened because we didn’t know better, because we weren’t ready, because we were hurting, or because life simply didn’t unfold the way we hoped.
And if I could go back, I would still wish for some of those things not to have happened.
That wish isn’t a promise to change the past. It’s not an attempt to punish myself for what I did or what I couldn’t do. It’s simply an acknowledgment that, given the choice, I would have preferred a gentler story.
But I don’t have that choice anymore.
So when these memories appear, I let myself feel whatever comes with them. I observe the thoughts as they arrive and allow them to leave when they’re ready. I don’t need to chase them, fight them, or force myself to find something positive in them.
I can be sad without spiraling. I can regret something without hating myself. I can wish the past had been different while accepting that it wasn’t.
Perhaps that’s what making peace with the past looks like for me.
Not forgetting. Not celebrating every hardship. Not pretending that everything happened for a reason.
Just learning to live with the marks that life has left on me.
Because I think we all carry scars, in one form or another. And when we see them, we remember. We remember what happened, how it felt, and who we were when we went through it.
We may no longer cry over those stories. We may no longer feel the need to revisit them. We may have built lives that are completely different from the ones we once had.
But somewhere inside us, we still know.
And perhaps a little sadness is simply part of being human.
The scars are still there. The stories behind them are still sad. And I can acknowledge both without wishing I were someone who had never lived through them.
Tonight, I’m grateful those days are behind me.
I wish some of them had never happened.
Both things can be true
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