We Are Our Memories

If we are our memoires, then it seems to be helpful for us to consider, "What have I chosen to remember and why?" As you think about what you focus your attention on, I would encourage you to ponder these things:

We Are Prone to Remember Our Failures

Do you realize that? We are notorious for marking the failures in our lives. It seems that successes are just that—successes. When you have a success there's really nothing more to say. Successes are something to be moved on from because we did it right. Now it's on to the next thing. Failures however, are the stuff of scrutiny. We have to pick it apart and figure out what we did wrong. As an added measure, we often beat ourselves up. We admonish ourselves for our stupidity or lack of insight or impulsive behaviors or whatever it was that got us there and screwed things up. And so we often remember our failures while our successes drift into the foggy backwaters of our minds.

We Are Prone to Focus on What We Fear

We also tend to remember our failures out of fear of repeating them. They stand as markers of dread, telling us that we better not do it again or reminding us of the consequences of our own stupidity. They keep us from wandering back into places where we're likely to be hurt again. They likewise keep us from being hurt by others, reminding us of what people did to us and how they did it. Our memories become the hazard signs strewn across the landscape of our lives and our histories, telling us of all the places we can't go; leaving our lives full of places we can't venture into verses being full of places sweet with success. Our lives become defined not by the places where we can sit and savor victories, but by the places we must avoid.

We become Defined by What We Remember

Over time, the memories that we focus on become the things that define us. We become the sum total of these reflections, pulling them together to create some sort of mosaic that says, "This is what I am, this is what identifies and defines me." We can end up building our value, our worth, our self-esteem and the overall assessment of ourselves on an inventorying of our fears and failures. Our confidence wanes. Our sense of self is deflated or destroyed altogether. We question ourselves constantly. An ability to seize our strengths vanishes as we don't see them in order to seize them. And we end up languishing, being immersed in a toxic blend of hopelessness and mediocrity.

Re-visit Your Memories

It may be time to revisit your past. Revisiting is not about reinventing or rewriting our history as historical revisionists are so prone to do. Rather, it's a re-evaluation. You may want to de-emphasize your fears and failure and highlight your successes and achievements, despite how small they may sometimes seem. Celebrate your victories, even if the victory was merely to survive. Given what you have had to face to survive may well be a victory. Acknowledge your strengths and the successes that they brought you. There are more successes back in your history than you likely realize. Find them. Set a memorial over them. Celebrate them. Allow them to draw you back to something you should not forget; something that made you what you are. If you do, your life and your view of yourself will change in ways most remarkable.