Your present self doesn't owe your past self anything

Or perhaps more precisely, your present self doesn't owe your past self obedience.

I've been realising lately that a break I took from various things I had committed myself to (including writing) has extended further than I expected, and gone deeper in meaning than I initially understood. For a long time, I thought it was a kind of burnout I needed to recover from and eventually push through so I could get back to doing the things I had decided were important.

But even when I stopped doing them, I didn't actually give myself a break from the pressure of feeling I should be doing them, or from the sense that I had somehow failed in multiple ways by stopping or even pausing.

The activities had stopped, but the self-judgement hadn't.

I’m now starting to understand that perhaps I wasn't only recovering from burnout. Perhaps I was also beginning - or trying - to reclaim a truer sense of ownership of my life.

I can start and stop whatever I want, whenever I want.

Yes, of course, there are sometimes moral and material costs to doing so. Other people may be affected, money may be lost, trust may need to be repaired and there may be consequences I simply have to accept. But I can weigh those things up mindfully, make a choice and own it.

That is part of owning my life, as opposed to allowing it to remain partially owned by the dreams, standards and commitments of a past version of me.

It's still a work in progress for me by the way. But I know I'm not the only one.

I think many of us quietly turn our past desires into present debts.

We once decided we would write the book, build the business, continue the podcast, finish the qualification, stay in the profession, keep servicing the long standing client, or become a particular kind of person.

And then at some point, without necessarily noticing it, wanting something becomes owing it.

The commitment begins to feel less like a choice and more like a contract we signed with a person who no longer entirely exists.

But our past selves were making choices based on what they knew, feared, needed and longed for at the time. Those choices mattered, but they were also hypotheses about what might make a good life. They were not contracts signed in blood.

None of this means that every abandoned commitment is an act of liberation, or that self-ownership means giving ourselves an endlessly persuasive excuse not to follow through.

Sometimes we stop because something is no longer ours. Sometimes we stop because continuing would ask us to feel fear, uncertainty, inadequacy, grief or boredom.

Sometimes surrender is wisdom and sometimes it is collapse dressed up in more flattering (i.e. BSing yourself) language.

The behaviour itself doesn't tell us which is which.

Perhaps the more honest questions are whether we are moving towards freedom or merely away from discomfort.

Would we actually stop if there were no shame attached to stopping?

Would we still continue if nobody admired us for following through?

There is also the question of what the original commitment represented.

Perhaps the goal was never really the book, the business, the audience, the career or the status, but rather it represented expression, belonging, safety, dignity, freedom or love. And so we may be able to release the particular form while still honouring the deeper need that gave rise to it.

So when I say that your present self doesn't owe your past self anything, I don't mean that your past self should be dismissed or treated with contempt or avoidance. Your past self deserves compassion and understanding. Their hopes deserve to be listened to. Their pain may still need to be felt. Their unfinished commitments may carry real consequences that need to be responsibly addressed.

But they do not get permanent authority over your life.

Your past self gets a voice, but not veto power. Your present self does not owe them obedience. It owes them understanding. It owes your future self honesty. And it owes the people affected by your choices responsibility.

Beyond that, you’re allowed to choose again.

You are allowed to discover that something you once wanted no longer belongs to you, you are allowed to grieve it without resurrecting it, and you are allowed to stop confusing consistency with integrity.

And you’re definitely allowed to design and build a life that is chosen by the person actually living it now.