Your Past Doesn't Define You.
Until It Does
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May, 26, 2025
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There’s a version of me that I would delete if I could. Not because she was evil or wild — she was just so… earnest. So soft.
She felt things too loudly, shared too much too quickly, and trusted her soft parts with the internet.
That girl was maksoofa in the way only young women are taught to be: ashamed of visibility, afraid of being seen wanting.
She posted long captions about feelings, romanticized her solitude, overshared on finsta, and deleted and re-uploaded things because she felt too exposed.
We’ve all been there. Looking back on older versions of ourselves — the ones who wore the wrong clothes, said the wrong things, loved the wrong people. The ones who had no boundaries, or had too many. The ones who overshared, overtrusted, overtried. And sometimes, the past feels like something you need to file away like a bad school photo: embarrassing but harmless.
But what if it’s more than that? What if your past — the one you swore you outgrew — is still in the room with you?
The idea that we can outrun who we were is somewhat seductive. That we can trim, archive, or blur out our past selves the same way we do old Instagram posts. Sometimes, we tell ourselves we’ve changed just because we’re no longer cringing at a Facebook memory. But is transformation really that tidy? Is reinvention truly that complete? Or does our past continue to speak through us — in the way we react, love, argue, fear, or disappear?
There’s no clean break. Who you were at 13, 17, 21, or even last Tuesday — they live in you. Maybe they’re quieter now.
Maybe you’ve done the work. Maybe you’re doing it. But erasure? That’s a myth. If anything, your past is less of a haunting and more of a hum — always in the background, shaping what you tolerate, what you chase, and who you become when no one’s watching.
Social media sells reinvention like it’s skincare. Clean slate, new aesthetic, healed girl era. Delete the posts, archive the chaos, start over. The illusion machine. It lets you perform growth, curate maturity, or turn old wounds into punchlines. But even online, even when you present the ‘healed’ version of yourself, traces remain. The people who remember, the friends who know, the screenshots that didn’t disappear. The internet has a memory. And so do you. The past doesn’t just leave; it negotiates with your present.
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Environment plays a role, too. The house you grew up in. The sibling dynamics. The family silence.
Maybe your version of home meant perfection was survival, or loudness was love. Those early definitions of safety?
They stick. You carry them into adult friendships, into how you set boundaries (or don’t), into who you think deserves softness. So much of our inner wiring was soldered in childhood, and it takes time, therapy, or a breakdown in a Carrefour parking lot to realize it.
There’s a specific kind of shame reserved for girls who’ve made visible mistakes — a social, gendered shame that tells you your missteps are permanent. That the things you’ve worn, said, felt, or fumbled somehow shape your moral worth.
Women are told that the past isn’t just a memory — it’s a measure. And so, for a lot of us, the archive isn’t neutral.
It’s something we want to bury, or edit, or burn.
But can we ever really escape it? Philosophers would say no— or at least, not entirely. The Ship of Theseus asks: if every part of a ship is replaced over time, is it still the same ship? If every friend, belief, outfit, heartbreak, city, version of ourselves changes — are we still us? We scroll back and see a person who feels unfamiliar, and yet the shame we felt is still pulsing under the skin.
Some people carry the past with pride — an aestheticized ‘glow up,’ or a rebrand. Others reject it. Pretend it didn’t happen.
But most of us exist somewhere in between: haunted and held by it. Because even if we’re constantly regenerating, the past leaves fingerprints. The way we love today is shaped by who we were taught to be. Our attachment styles aren’t just psychological jargon; they’re emotional fossils. The girl who begged to be picked still whispers in the ear of the one who pretends she doesn’t care.
We are shaped by the cities we grew up in, the parents who raised us (or didn’t), the schools that made us shrink, the friends who left. No matter how many glow-ups we post, no matter how emotionally articulate we become — the past doesn’t just vanish. The idea that we can 'move on' from everything is both soothing and unrealistic. Some things stick, and it’s very human. The goal isn’t to delete our old selves — it’s to understand them. To hold them gently. To know which parts to keep and which to outgrow.
However, being shaped by the past doesn’t mean being stuck in it. There’s also power in regeneration.
You’re allowed to revise, to outgrow your own narrative. You’re allowed to say, “I didn’t know better then, but I do now.”
Growth isn’t linear. It’s more like spirals, where you revisit old patterns with new awareness.
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Still, pretending your past never happened? That’s not growth. That’s PR, and your soul isn’t a brand. You don’t need to scrub your history to deserve where you are. The truth is, the more honest you are about who you’ve been, the more compassionate you become about who you’re becoming. Healing isn’t about distance from your past — it’s about being able to sit next to it without flinching.
You don’t live in a vacuum. You’re shaped by the way your parents talked to each other, the streets you walked home from school, the friend who humiliated you at 16. Even if you glow up and move to another country, there are parts of your past self that quietly ride along in the suitcase. The way you flinch when someone raises their voice. The way you freeze when someone says “we need to talk.” Those are bookmarks. And bookmarks mean you haven’t really closed the chapter — just paused.
Some things never change; the small core of you that’s always been there. But so much does. The point isn’t to become someone new. Maybe it’s to become someone honest. Someone whole. Not despite your past, but because of how you survived it.
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