Accepting Yourself by Letting Go of the Past

For the past month I have been packing my house and preparing to move back to Spain, where I grew up, at least for a few months. I realized how many things Sherry and I have been accumulating for the past 7 years since we moved in together. We moved through 4 different apartments, some bigger and some smaller, and we had to make difficult decisions to let go of many things we cherish — from our wedding wishes cards (yes, we took pictures), to many books that already started collecting dust, to all the stuff “we once thought we would end up using”.

Together with my writing challenge, 2022 has already become the year where I let go of the past — traumas, regrets, resentments, opportunities, unfulfilled commitments and physical objects. And it feels amazing. I am now ready to move forward.

It is true what they say, when you hold on to things from the past, you will always have extra weight that will make it harder to move on with your life. In order to grow we need to let go of the past, and accept who we are today. It includes three major acts:

• Letting go of personal objects. We tend to give more meaning that what is intrinsic to the object itself, attaching sentimental value based on the emotions or memories that they represent to us. To me it just means that there are things I literally never used, but which I kept because it meant something. What I understand now is that all the meaning is in my head, and I am holding on to the object because of the fear of forgetting the memory or confronting the emotion. We adopted simple rules: if we did not use something in the last year, we give it up. If it does not spark joy, we let it go (just like Marie Kondo says).
• Letting go of regrets. As much as people say “you should not regret anything in life”, we all do it. That is because regret comes up to teach us something. The question is if you are going to take the lesson and move on, or be harsh on yourself and hold on to the emotion attached with the regret. I say let’s not be harsh on ourselves and learn to love who we are. It definitely starts by forgiving ourselves for the “mistakes” that we made, as Nathan Cavaglione beautifully wrote in one of his posts

“Most of my frustration came from my unfulfilled expectation for myself to make no mistake. Once I forgave myself for the turn of events, my body became light as a feather,…”

It is not easy to love yourself as we are our biggest critics. We tend to look at our past decisions based on the knowledge and wisdom of the present, which is unfair to our past self. I have not been giving my past self enough credit for getting me to where I am today. I have told myself before, “why did I not start this journey before?”. My coach and mentor Amir Cohen helped me understand that actually my past self knew better in the moment than my current self, as I lived the context back then. As my wife says, we always do the best we can at the moment. So believe in yourself today and in your past self.

• Letting go of resentment towards others. During my childhood I got to meet many resentful people, and I absorbed it. Though I learnt soon that it was not good for me, I was still somehow hooked to the feeling. A part of me wants to hold on to the resentment, just as I had seen growing up, which most of the time meant holding the emotion inside until I could not anymore and I exploded. You can see the pattern already… Thanks to Sherry’s patience and ability to see through me, I learnt to speak about my feelings in real-time, which means I do not even hold the resentment anymore. Now I practice this daily, and I aim to find those resentments that I still hold from the past. Do not worry, they surface more often than not since we are inevitably triggered by those emotions that we hold on to.

At the end of the day, your relationship with yourself is the most important one, and we need to learn how to care for it. It is all about being able to walk lighter through life, both literally and metaphorically.

💡 Pro tip: take an hour to write a letter about all the things that bother you about a specific topic (could be a parent, an event, a set of decisions, etc…). Make sure to be detailed on what and why it annoys you and makes you angry. If you have to yell or cry, do it. Then, go out to nature, take some deep breaths and burn the letter as you feel your body and soul become lighter.

For the full list of posts, see The Real 30 Under 30.