About anxiety and distant past.

Some monotonous weekends make me thoughtful. Time goes by slowly and the series don't seem so interesting to me. While trying to download new apps on my phone, I realized that I didn't have any storage space available.

"Hatred!"

The irritation was spontaneous and I ended up thinking about deleting old photos. Descending through the image galleries, the anguish seemed to have suddenly passed. My current life, I assume, is a mess. I'm not sure about the people around me and I don't feel open enough to meet new ones, however, back in the old days, my mind seemed very different, according to the images I saved as a souvenir.

A selfie with a friend who got married. Another from a circle of superficial but fun friendships. A screenshot of my whatsapp screen with long conversations, full of people I thought I would never have gotten close to.

As I unraveled my entire past looking for virtual memories that could be erased, I realized that remembering the past doesn't always mean suffering. They say the same thing over and over, "leave it behind", "kill your past to save your future", "focus on the goals". The further I scrolled down the images, the more I realized how stupid this was.

Some of those images really brought pain. Friends who walked away without me being able to say anything. Pains and moments I thought I would never get over. Past achievements are greater than the present ones, and by the way, I've been fighting not to lose the things I have tooth and nail, but looking back, I've seen that I've had much greater victories.

I've been leaving my cell phone off because of the damn anxiety, as the motivational texts I find send, but the answer was right there.

It is not necessary to suffer to keep people around who have already given every indication of not being comfortable anymore. In the olden years, I also gained people, lost people, kept people…

I had friends that I thought would be forever and they weren't.

I've been to places I never went back.

I went through trials that I thought I would not overcome.

I lost people I thought I couldn't live without.

And I survived all those things.

The answer to the present dilemma was not to look to the future with hope, but to look to the past with gratitude. Not with melancholy or anger. But with the learning that as it says in Ecclesiastes, “What was, that is what will be again; and what has been done, it will be done again; so that there is nothing new under the sun.”

If you look at the past, you will see that there is a version of you that has overcome difficult things and survived. What used to be overcome, today, will also be overcome.

Finally, there was no repetitive image deletion, no necessary digital cleaning of my phone. To tell you the truth, the app I intended to download wasn't even that important. What I really thought about erasing was a 3.9 gig memory chat, which currently bothers my sanity. But that is for another post.

Source: Pixabay