I definitely spend more time thinking about the past, and it’s something I’m planning to bring up in therapy. (If you’re my therapist, and you see this, enjoy the sneak peek, I guess.)
I think a lot about past events in my life, and what I should or should not have done differently. I do this for big events as well as small. I used to have nightmares about a time when I was in grade school that I got on the wrong bus to go home. It was a completely understandable mistake, because my bus had a last-minute change, and I got turned around. The driver of the bus that I found myself on kindly took me directly to my front door as I sat shaking, trying not to cry, in the front seat, with the judgmental eyes of my eight-year-old classmates on me.
Even just typing that out puts a ball of anxiety into the pit of my stomach. It’s such a small thing, but the fear (that I wouldn’t get home, that I was being judged by my classmates, that I was inconveniencing this kind bus driver and taking them away from their regular route) was so so visceral that it has sat with me for twenty-six years.
There are other parts of my past that I wish I could forget, or that I could put a film over, so that they feel less. Less painful, less worrisome, less sad . . . just less. And, regrettably, I focus on these things more than I should. I replay conversations in my head over and over and over, relive heartache and confusion and hurt over and over and over.
I also suffer from “the what-ifs,” as my dad would say. I suppose you could categorize that as “thinking about the future.”
I think part of why I work on this blog and write about my creative endeavors is because I’m trying to focus more on what’s happening in front of me, instead of dwelling on the past or future. Enjoying the hard work it takes to maintain a garden, develop a novel, create crocheted items — it’s all a way of being physically, tactilely present. I am here, in the moment.
I am here.
Liz Cultivates | L.M. Fern 
Leave a comment