My Past Selves

 

I don’t want to speak for this child I once was. That was long ago. She’s part of me but she didn’t sign up for anything. She didn’t give permission to be a witness or an example or a symbol of what happened to me as far as mental illness, as far as treatment.

I won’t sacrifice her in the name of promoting my causes. I won’t spoil her innocence and ownership of self to say, oh look, the bad started here. Look at the conditions. Because she’s not part of judgments I hold as an adult.

Is there even value in propping up one’s past self in that way? I mean, whether it’s to show contrast between the potential and what that became? Or to show where all of these confusing and turbulent present conditions started, is there value? I’m feeling that a case could be made but needs to be balanced against actually using an idea of my younger self to do so. How can I know if it’s ethical in the sense of presuming to know what I thought then and what hopes and disappointments I faced.

 

This older child that I was, showing such assertion, what was she thinking down under all of that bravado? I might say I know. It’s when many problems started. Yet, she’s not my personal poster child about the beginnings of depression. How can I hold her up and proclaim that if she’d only been provided with more earnest conversations and creative outlets, oh how different it might have gone? Only she would know, her secrets to keep and not owned by me, not accessible to me for making all kinds of points about psychiatric treatment and therapy and inpatient hospitalizations. A silent agreement preserves the beauty of past me by not demeaning those images now.

It’s not like I don’t want to trot out all of the old photos and point and remark on how much soul was crushed out of me along the road. I’m not crushed. I wasn’t being crushed then. Vast treatment problems from adolescence to now didn’t crush me either.

 

This girl, an adolescent carrying the gloom of all existence, would be horrified at attention to her depression. She was just trying to survive difficult times, and within that she found little jewels of joy. I carry those sparks but don’t have a download of her full experience.

I’m often drawn into exploring my past, which is fine, but like any memoir, it’s subjective. There’s always me interfering and interpreting and reimagining.

If I feel I’ve been done wrong, that younger versions of me were corrupted by that, then I have to place blame. Then I’m compelled, directed, to be guardian to selves that no longer exist. Except in photos. Except in memories blurred by time and only accurate in a captured emotion.

I want to do right by the parts of me I’ve incorporated but also left behind. I want them to speak for themselves and their time, not mine, not my issues now, and not in my critiques of psychiatric treatment. It’s a pact I must keep and respect.