Your Soul Is Literally Stuck in The Past Until You Write About It
You built a shrine to the past, and now you worship it
We used to explore abandoned buildings with the architecture kids.
We used to sit around and talk about life, meaning, and the universe. Then, we’d go get drunk. Then, we’d go to class the next day, hungover.
We used to drive around listening to music. That music feels exactly like that time when I listen to it today.
We were young, on the bleeding edge of what was new, and everything we thought and did seemed to really matter.
All of that is lost, and it’s never, ever coming back.
How do you deal with that?
In my experience, you write. Here’s why.
What Sad People Have in Common
“What do sad people have in common? It seems they have all built a shrine to the past, and often they go there and do a strange wail and worship.”
If you can believe it, that is a poem from the 14th century. I say if you want to know if what you’re feeling is normal, see if people felt it 700 years ago.
Last fall, I was walking around Berlin with my headphones on. I was in a fantastic mood — borderline spiritual. As I walked, Berliners passed me by. I was struck by their facial expressions: stern, sad, sullen. Not one of them looked happy. Classic Germans.
Still, I was in a great mood. I was also touched by all the sadness. I had this thought: Sadness is incredible. You would never feel sad unless you once loved something. You just can’t stand to watch it slip away from you, moment by moment.
I had another thought: I bet if these Berliners faced what is making them sad, head-on, they would find a new, surprising reason to be happy.
You Used to Focus on The Horizon
When you’re young, you have nothing to look at except the horizon. There just wasn’t enough of the past to weigh your eyes down.
More and more, the past gathers mass. Mistakes were made, opportunities missed, and love lost — all of those accumulate and slowly increase in gravity. If left unchecked, they collapse into a black hole with an inescapable event horizon. That’s why most people enter adulthood with all their faith crushed out of them.
Is that how it has to be?
Should we just give in and accept that things will never be like they used to be?
Should we slip into the black hole?
The Incredible Pull of Painful Memories
Your memory is not a video recorder.
It’s not trying to be a technically accurate record of the past. Who cares what happened, exactly?
Human memory is a regret machine. It is hell-bent on ensuring we don’t keep making the same mistakes. When you’re not able to sleep for the 4th night in a row because you’re anxiously replaying your mistakes (or just a minor social faux pax), you might conclude you’re “broken” or that you have a “chemical imbalance,” or that humans are generally “not designed” for the modern world. According to personality psychologists, that’s not true. You’re just not listening to what your brain is trying to tell you.
We will forever be locked in a struggle with the past as long as we avoid looking at it.
When you refuse to look at something scary, your mind tends to inflate it to everything scary about everything. When you turn around, you say, “This scary thing is just this: one scary thing. I can handle that.”
In other words, the only way out is through.
Writing Is Thinking on Steriods
When you merely think (or speak), you allow things to remain somewhat in the fog. A thought can be dismissed. Something said can be taken back. However, something written, with careful intention, etches itself in the stone of your mind.
Sure, if only in your mind, it’s better to face something rather than distracting yourself with social media, work, or drugs. Having the thought and fully feeling the sadness of, “I wish I were young again,” is better than getting drunk again, no doubt.
But writing about that sadness is something like a 10x multiplier, in my experience.
When people annoyingly try to get you to journal, that’s what they’re trying to convey to you.
It has this insane power to make your soul young again.
What Is a ‘Soul?’
In the headline of this post, I said your soul is literally stuck in the past. I meant that.
Your soul, in my view, is your conscious and unconscious motivations. Most basically, your biological motivation to continue to be alive. Even this can be overridden by thinking (suicidal thoughts)… but, interestingly, only in humans. Then, you have the urge to procreate. This urge is used to have sex, go to a bar, or channeled to write a book, for example. Then, you have layers and layers of subtler motivations, biases, traumas, and cognitive dissonance that are in knots that not even Freud himself could begin to untie.
When you have memories that are old but still cause you pain, that means that the knots of motivational energy are literally stuck in the past, instead of here, in the present, helping you do the tasks that are in front of you. To illustrate: how often are you unmotivated to do your work but very motivated to ruminate on your childhood?
How To Get Your Soul Unstuck From the Past
Simple (but not easy): you inventory your entire past by writing about it, take responsibility for everything that went wrong (even if it was only 1% your fault), make amends to everyone you wronged, and forgive everyone who wronged you.
If you do this (and take it seriously), the energy you free into the present moment will amaze you.
Here’s how it’s done.
Write
Break your life into 6 parts. Here’s my life’s breakdown, for example:
- The Golden Age (0–9)
- Post Divorce (9–15)
- The Awkward Years (16–21)
- First Major Relationship (22–25)
- First Heartbreak (25–27)
- Spiritual Awakening (28–Now)
Some eras are longer than others — the theme is the most important part.
Then, take one era per week and write.
You will be shocked at how much you remember as you write (trust me). I know people who wrong something like 20,000 words.
Before you start, post your eras in the comments.
I’m focusing more on my substack, The Warrior Creative. I’ll post these articles there, too.
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