Please Forgive Yourself for Who You Had to Be

There’s a version of you that lives in your memory who you don’t always know what to do with. Maybe you feel embarrassed by her. Maybe you feel angry at her. Maybe you feel a quiet kind of grief when you think about the choices she made and the things she believed.

And if you’re honest, there are moments when you don’t just feel distant from her, you feel like you need to distance yourself from her. Like she’s someone you’ve outgrown and would rather not be associated with. But what if she’s not the problem?

What if she’s actually the reason you’re here?

Because that version of you wasn’t operating with the clarity you have now. She didn’t have the same language, the same awareness, the same distance from the environment she was in. She was doing something much more fundamental than “getting it right.”

She was trying to belong, to stay safe. She was trying to make sense of the world with the tools she had. And she did: not perfectly or in a way that aligns with who you are now, but she adapted in the ways she needed to.

It’s easy, from where you stand now, to turn your current awareness into a weapon against your past self. To look back with this new perspective and think, How did I not see it? or Why did I do that? But that question quietly assumes that you had the same vantage point then that you have now. You didn’t. You grew into this perspective. You didn’t start with it.

And growth, real growth, almost always creates this strange tension where the person you are now can see things the past version of you couldn’t. That doesn’t make the past version foolish. It makes the present version expanded. There’s a difference.

What we see so often is women trying to heal while still holding their past selves on trial. Still collecting evidence and building a case for why they should have known better, done better, been better.

But healing doesn’t actually happen there.

It happens when you start to understand the conditions you were inside of, and how reasonable your responses were within those conditions. It happens when you can look back and, instead of tightening, feel something soften.

Hear us out, this isn't about approval of everything, nor are you rewriting history. Can you stay present with this part of you just a minute longer and recognize:

Of course you believed that, given where you were.
Of course you moved that way, given what you were taught.
Of course you didn’t know yet, because you hadn’t learned it yet.

That kind of compassion doesn’t make you complacent as you might fear it will. It makes you honest. And honesty is what actually allows you to change, because you’re no longer spending your energy resisting who you were.

You’re integrating her.

The truth is, you don’t become yourself by rejecting your past. You become yourself by including it and by letting it belong in your story without letting it define your future.

The woman you were back then isn’t someone you need to cut off. She’s someone who carried you through something complex and often invisible. Someone who made choices inside a system that shaped what felt possible and what didn’t. And now you’re here, with more awareness, more agency, more room to choose.

That didn’t happen in spite of her; it happened because of her.