Any woman in her 30s would negate the desire to relive any of her early 20s. It’s a disorienting time of fluctuating hormones, the pressure to have it together and one too many late nights. The grass is usually greener once you grow out being a feral young adult.
As women committed to growth and evolution, it can be difficult to acknowledge the chapters you’re less proud of. Whether you let yourself get mistreated in relationships, indulged in unhealthy habits or ended up hurting someone else, it can be easy to shame former versions of yourself. Yet, every version of yourself you’ve ever been made you who you are now. Every lesson that you learned had to be through the trial and error of experience.
Whether you’re working on forgiving a version of yourself from five years ago, five months ago or five days ago, here’s why it matters.
The Art of Self-Forgiveness
It’s cringey to think of your hormonal teenage years, where you made your own mother the enemy. Now, in adulthood, you may be more intentional about spending sacred time together. It’s also hard to think about all the times you showed up unconditionally for a person who mistreated you. You have impenetrable boundaries and standards. However, it’s the discomfort of those memories that informed your ability to know better. It also fueled your capacity to do so.
It’s important to shift perspective and extract the nectar from the experience. Its accompanying lessons molded you into an evolved self. Now, you stand as one that carries every version she’s ever been within her while growing.
As much as compassion for those who wronged you will set the soul free from the imprisonment of resentment, so does forgiving your own self. Self-compassion is the only route to true liberation, broken down by the four Rs: responsibility, remorse, restoration and renewal.
Take full accountability for any harm you may have caused or the ways that you have inhibited your progression. Demonstrating a sense of regret for your actions may bring accompanying shame or guilt, but it’s important to alchemize those negative emotions into positive action. Make amends with others and yourself, while rebuilding anything damaged in the process. Integrating these learned lessons into practices, whether it looks like instilling boundaries or practicing new healthy habits.
Holding onto resentment for yourself can keep you cemented in the past and inhibit even further growth, so it’s important to reflect as fondly as you can on every iteration of you.