On Past & Isolation

Recently, I was finding my old email. It was connected to everything who I was in the past decade. I can’t fathom the fact that it has been a decade ago and I spent pretty much half of it in hiding. If you ask me, what I was hiding for? By now, I wasn’t sure either but there was a time when I vanished leaving no trace to all the people I knew.

When I looked at this email and everything connected to it. Everything looks a lot different from my present life. My current self perhaps romanticized those moments. I was richer, I had so many connections, and I had a freaking awesome life. At some point, while in university, I could spend a day in a different country and have a class the next day. It was the kind of dream that most people my age would want to have. But the way to the top was fragile and I wasn’t mentally stable enough to think through everything. I thought with the life I used to have , I had all the answers but actually, I was running away and never dared facing my problems.

Eventually, everything fell apart. I got even more and more disconnected with my reality. Then it gets darker and I almost find no way to return to my normal self. A decade has passed now & whenever I came across a piece that reminded me of my past self, I felt a little nostalgia. After a day or two, I usually come to my senses that I discounted a lot of bad experiences and the fact that my current life isn’t as bad as before. I might not have some of the things I used to have but they are replaced by newer things, experiences, and the things I wasn’t able to have before, like the ability to play games again.

On Isolation

I recognized that isolation was one of the causes. I just did them a little too extreme. While running away from the people I physically knew, I was equally being quiet everywhere. While still writing here, I focused too much on this space & I slowly forgot that my life outside all of this was equally awesome. I regained all those back when I was wandering last year that I managed to build connections and friendship. I was pretty much surprised that though I isolated myself for quite a while, my existence isn’t truly a meaningless one. I think that was something I’ve been longing for a while,to know that my existence isn’t meaningless.

Isolation does quite a damage to my self-confidence too. While I had problems before, it gets even more serious with my isolation. I felt like I don’t deserve to be out there because I was uglier than a lot of people. When I stopped isolating myself and going out there, once in a while I had people complimenting me, taking me to dinner out of nowhere and just hanging out with me despite how I might look.

And, since I came out of my isolation, I found out that a lot of my former friends had wondered where I went missing. It was like I suddenly reappeared from the surface after so long and some of them were happy reconnecting with me again. Today, I don’t intend to isolate myself again. I suppose it is the part that differs from my past self where I could wipe out everything and leave no trace. Now, I don’t have the urge to do them again. I am pretty much content with the life I have. I used to feel so ashamed of many things because I thought I wasn’t pretty enough, etc but that was part of my past that I discounted a lot. If today people called me ugly, I wouldn’t really care. That’s also something I wouldn’t trade because it was something I achieved through a decade of pain and struggles.

From that I learned that our brain and memory do a good job filtering all the negative parts out and only shows us the memory that was on the surface. The part where it was happier, since, perhaps we have tendencies to only document the good parts of our lives rather than our struggle.