The past, as innocuous as it sometimes seems, plays a central role on how one lives their everyday life. This is both bad and good; getting shocked by sticking a fork in an electric socket teaches you to avoid sticking metal things in electrical sockets, having your trust in someone betrayed by that person teaches you to avoid trusting that person (or potentially any new person). And it is those sorts of “lessons” that we carry with us for the rest of our lives, whether we know it or not. They inform our judgment, they guide our decisions, and they help to establish our behavior.
Relationships, and our interactions in them, are fundamentally advised by past experiences and, for good or for ill, can be greatly impacted by them. Get cheated on, then maybe you’ll always think you’re being cheated on; be treated like shit, then maybe you’ll always feel like you should be treated like shit; be turned away when asking for help, maybe you’ll never ask for help again; get screwed over when trying to be the best you can be, maybe you’ll never try to be good again; get told you’re fat, stupid, ugly and a terrible person all of the time, maybe you’ll start to feel like you are; I could go on and on.
I’m only listing negative effects because that’s how I feel right now. Sure, I’ve taken away plenty of positive lessons and had many positive experiences and, in general, that leads to healthier, more positive relationships in the future. That isn’t really an issue, because no one has to struggle with the repercussions of past rights done to me. It’s the past wrongs that cause the problems, 95% of what I assume other people mean when they refer to “baggage”. I never really put much faith into that idea; if you love someone then what they carry with them is part of them and also something that you love. Sure, it may be too much for you to “handle”, but that doesn’t make them less of a person and can’t make you love them less.
However, it still impacts the relationship. I know I can be seriously insecure; almost debilitating so. I can go almost anywhere and feel like everyone is looking at me and mentally running through the list of things that’s wrong with me. And that is a BIG FUCKING LIST. That insecurity follows me everywhere and is lurking in the back of my mind in every conversation I have with another person. I’ve taught myself how to handle it and I think I can hold a conversation without letting that conversation be driven by my favorite flaw. That wasn’t always the case. I know I can account for most of the relationship problems in my past simply by looking there. Those problems are too numerous to list but what I can succinctly state is the impact that one thing directly caused in the relationship, and having said that, the incalculable indirect effects it had on the other person’s relationships going forward.
Well that thought made me sick to my stomach.
Struggling with the consequences of past wrongs in relationships is never easy. That’s why I called it struggling. It’s easy to say “fuck this”, give up, and walk away, and sometimes that is the best thing to do. But some people are worth the fight, some relationships are worth saving, and sometimes not giving up is the best thing you can do for yourself; who doesn’t need a little personal education concerning relationships? It only becomes problematic when that relationship is becoming detrimental to your life as a whole. When I start to question my place in the relationship, my value to it and from it, and myself in general, that’s when I start to wonder if the fight is worth it.