Hindsight is 20/20
Imagine this: You are sitting on your couch, watching TV after a long day. You are just starting to unwind after focusing on ways to make your life better, strengthen your relationships, figure out your career, etc.. It’s been difficult and confusing and stressful. All of the sudden, a future version of yourself pops up in your living room and starts criticizing you. Telling you all the ways that you have messed up and that you should know better. This future version of yourself is saying things that you don’t understand because they are referring to things that you have not encountered or learned yet. You start to feel confused, shamed, and maybe a little hopeless. This is what you are doing to yourself whenever you look back on your past decisions and meet yourself with criticism.
Do any of the following statements sound familiar to you? “I should have known better”, or “How could I have done that? I’m so dumb.”, or even better, “I deserve whatever has happened to me because I made a choice that landed me here.” Ooof. Just look at all the judgement. How do you feel when you say these things to yourself? My guess is you do not feel better. In fact, I imagine you feel like the version of you I described at the beginning of this blog post. Confused, shamed, and a little hopeless. What I remind my clients, and myself when I fall into this way of talking to myself, is that hindsight is 20/20. It is easy to sit in the present, with the knowledge you have now that whatever situation you are referring to has played out, and judge past you. Of course you have a different perspective on it. You know how it turned out. But if we go back to the you that made whatever decisions you are beating yourself up about we realize that that version of you was doing the best they could with the information they had.
We have to try our best to remember that we are always growing, evolving, changing, and learning. We can’t ever really know how things will play out and we can only make the best decisions for ourselves and our situations based on what we know right now. Sure, sometimes we ignore red flags, or make mistakes, and those experiences ultimately help us learn something about ourselves, others, and/or the world around us. Hopefully, we are aware enough to take the lesson from the experience and apply it to the next time we are faced with a difficult task or situation. That is how we grow and move forward. Turning back to our past selves and beating them up does not change the past. It only makes the present more difficult to bear. So my invitation to you is to check in every now and then and make sure that you are not beating past you up. Try to show yourself compassion and explore how those past experiences shape who you are today. Trust me, future you will thank you.
