Miserum
Well-known member
I was lying in bed last night trying to get to sleep when, as usual, my brain triggered me into remembering a no longer relevant humiliating and self-deprecating event.
Of course, I started to cringe and smack my forehead about this event that must have happened 10 or more years ago, trying to evade the memory and think of something else: "You ****ing idiot. Why would you do that?? Wow, you are so ****ing stupid."
Then I immediately thought, "this trigger literally has no bearing on who I am today."
So what if I did something stupid 10 years ago. Is that me now? No.
I read somewhere that each time we remember something with a lot of emotional substance, it's like reliving that experience. But with this one thought, I managed to separate my current self from the self within the memory, almost as if I was looking at it objectively from a bird's-eye view. I actually forced myself to think about this memory over and over from this vantage point, and it bothered me a great deal less because my current self was removed from it.
I know this sounds like a long-winded description of "the past is the past" but for some reason this pre-sleep experience, to me, gives that platitude meaning.
Of course, I started to cringe and smack my forehead about this event that must have happened 10 or more years ago, trying to evade the memory and think of something else: "You ****ing idiot. Why would you do that?? Wow, you are so ****ing stupid."
Then I immediately thought, "this trigger literally has no bearing on who I am today."
So what if I did something stupid 10 years ago. Is that me now? No.
I read somewhere that each time we remember something with a lot of emotional substance, it's like reliving that experience. But with this one thought, I managed to separate my current self from the self within the memory, almost as if I was looking at it objectively from a bird's-eye view. I actually forced myself to think about this memory over and over from this vantage point, and it bothered me a great deal less because my current self was removed from it.
I know this sounds like a long-winded description of "the past is the past" but for some reason this pre-sleep experience, to me, gives that platitude meaning.
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