The Truth About Looking Back

View every experience as an opportunity to help yourself and others

Today I woke up with a feeling. Something was telling me that I needed to call a friend who has been struggling with her thesis and, therefore, her mental health.

A thesis can be terrifying if you allow that little voice at the back of your head to take over. There’s so much work involved, so many pieces depending on other pieces to form a complete picture.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, lost in the midst of fragmented paragraphs and confusing terminology. Gaps in your literature review become mouths that laugh at you every time you open the file.

You become afraid of moving forward in case you make a mistake, one you cannot undo, one that will make you want to give up.

My friend aired her thoughts, anxieties, and worries, turning our phone call into a therapy session (like only psychology students can). Then we came up with a small plan for today and tomorrow, focusing on easy, manageable tasks.

I’ve always been the ‘practical’ one in our circle of friends because if there’s a problem, I sift through the dirt and muck, the worries and doubts, and analyse that mind gremlin until it’s forced to give up its secrets. Once you know what kind of gremlin you’re dealing with, you know what poison to kill it with.

I compared her thesis issue to running a marathon (of course) because although she has 15,000 words to write, all she needs to focus on for now is 500 words.

You don’t start a marathon thinking, ‘Only 26 miles to go!’ You start by running one mile. One mile is easy. It’s an achievable goal. Then you run another mile, and another, breaking it down into manageable chunks.

The task ahead will overwhelm you if you focus solely on how much more work there’s left to go and how many mistakes you could potentially make. You’d want to sit down and give up. Every small issue and mistake grow into mountains too steep to overcome.

Sometimes we get trapped inside our heads, and all we see are potential pitfalls.

Knowing she was still working on hers, I pulled up my thesis last week to look over it, but rather than feel proud, I cringed. Should’ve done more in this section, could’ve added more here and there…

But I pushed those thoughts away because the thesis was accepted, and my grade was good (damn good for something I wrote during lockdown with kids).

This form of self-criticism reminds me of a past marathon. By going too fast and not refuelling, I was struggling. All I could think about was, ‘I should’ve had that banana at mile ten’.

So caught up in this mistake yet not wanting to admit to it, it didn’t occur to me that I could stop at any minute and eat that damn banana. The power to stop repeating this mistake was with me the whole time, but I was too focused on getting ahead to see it.

It’s far too easy to look back and be blinded by mistakes.

Looking back when you can’t change anything, only to torture yourself, won’t help you. It’s a waste of energy.

I couldn’t run those first ten miles over again or fix any of those mistakes in my thesis, but I could use the experiences.

My mistakes could benefit my friend and make their life easier.

This is how I see life, even Medium.

Writing good articles seemed like a massive challenge when I first joined. Always aiming for great titles, subtitles, keywords, engaging content can turn little things into huge problems.

Striving to do so much better than everyone else, to be recognised and appreciated, can not only hamper creativity but stunt your growth.

You make more mistakes or repeat mistakes because you stare straight ahead, wanting to keep up with everyone else. You become afraid of missing out if you take your hands off the keyboard for even a minute.

Too caught up in the race forward, you forget to look back to see what works and what doesn’t.

You forget to learn from your mistakes because you never face them. You forget to stop and eat that banana.

Hindsight is full of new opportunities

So, this morning I made myself go back. Rather than pretend no mistakes were ever made, I edited some of my older articles. Although I couldn’t change the impression those articles had already made, I could make them better for the next reader.

Every day you have an opportunity to show that you are different from yesterday and that your mistakes have made you stronger and wiser.

You can do these things because the past is not full of mistakes. The past is full of lessons, springboards you can use to get ahead in the future.

All you need to do is dare look back, so you can move forward and stop going around in circles.

Should you be lucky enough to never make a mistake, maybe take a moment and look around. Maybe there’s someone else that would appreciate learning from your experience, or just need someone to listen to their worries for a moment or two :)

As we say in the running community: we never leave a runner behind, even if that means walking the rest of the way with them!

Shoutouts!

If you don’t find the time to edit an article today, take a moment to read Susie Kearley’s article about how important it is to cherish your loved ones and the memories they leave behind. If you need a good laugh, Tamil has shared some of the fun lessons children teach us, and it is far too relatable!

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