What Do We Do With Our Old Selves?

I keep finding versions of myself I don’t recognize. Or worse—I do recognize them, and I flinch. They're tucked in old notebooks, caught in Facebook memories I never asked to see, hiding in songs I used to loop on the drive home from someone I swore was my forever. Sometimes I hear their voice in mine mid-sentence, and I want to bite my tongue. Other times, I miss them so much I feel like I’m grieving someone who never died.

What do we do with these past selves? The ones we outgrew. The ones we abandoned. The ones we tried to kill with therapy, with apologies, with silence.

Some of them make me cringe. The version of me who begged to be loved by someone who could barely look me in the eye. The one who thought shrinking would earn safety. The one who said yes to everything just to avoid the sting of rejection. I want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them, scream, "Have some fucking self-respect!"

But then I remember how desperate they were. How lonely. How convinced they were that being chosen meant being saved.

And then there are the ones I miss with a kind of nostalgic ache. The dreamer. The romantic. The girl who wrote poems in the margins of her homework. The kid who believed people were good, even after all the proof that they weren’t. I envy her sometimes. Her softness. Her hope. Her willingness to keep trying. I don’t know where she went, but I feel the loss like a bruise that never healed right.

I think we all have a closet full of ghosts. Versions of ourselves we shut the door on and hoped would stay quiet. But they don’t. They show up. When you’re drunk at 2am. When someone says your name a certain way. When you walk past the diner where you used to write breakup letters in your notes app, like prayers no one would ever answer.

And it’s easy to hate them. To mock the choices we made. To treat our past selves like cautionary tales instead of people who did the best they could with what they had. But maybe that’s the cruelty we’re trying to unlearn. The reflex to be ashamed of who we were, instead of being curious. Instead of kind.

Because here’s the truth: they got us here.

All of them. The naive ones, the reckless ones, the people-pleasers, the ones who loved too fast or not at all, the ones who burned everything down just to see if anyone would notice the smoke. They all played a part. They all carried us—limping, screaming, silent, stubborn—to this moment.

So what do we do with our old selves?

We let them haunt us, maybe. But gently. We let them sit beside us without always needing to shove them back into the dark. We listen. We forgive. We thank them, even when we don’t fully understand them. Even when we’re still mad. Even when the wounds they left are still healing.

We don’t have to let them drive. But we can stop pretending they never existed.

Because the truth is, they’re not just ghosts.

They’re witnesses. They remember what we survived.

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