Confessions
I have been cruel. I have been careless. I have hurt lives, innocent lives, without even realizing the weight of what I was doing. Sometimes it was negligence. Sometimes ignorance. Sometimes malice I didn’t even know I carried or was capable of.
I look back at myself and I weep for how blind I was, how thoughtless, how easily I directed my anger outward and failed to protect what was fragile.
I’ve been a hypocrite. I pretended to know things I didn’t. I assumed I understood, when all I really knew was not a drop in the ocean. I neglected the people who mattered to chase things that didn’t. I wasted years of my life chasing people who hurt me and in doing so, I ignored the people I truly cared about. I failed them, I failed myself. I took on responsibilities I wasn’t ready for, and the consequences fell on others, and it was all my fault.
I lived a life that now feels shameful. I said terrible things, acted thoughtlessly, and perpetuated harm in a world already full of it. I believed I was good. I was completely ignorant. And yet, even knowing that, the shame doesn’t erase the harm. It sits in me, heavy, constant at times, coming in flashbacks when I least expect it.
And still, I hope I am different now. I feel remorse, true remorse. I feel empathy I didn’t have before. I see the patterns I once repeated blindly. I notice when I am careless, when I am hurtful, and I try to stop myself. I don’t always succeed, but I am trying.
I can’t erase the past, and that alone weighs on my very being. I can’t undo the pain I caused. I cannot go back in time no matter how much I wish I could. I often hope this was all a nightmare, that I would soon wake up sighing in relief, having learnt lessons without the expense of others… but I know it's not a nightmare. I know it's not, no matter how much it feels like it.
But I can look at it. I can hold it. I can let it guide me to be careful, to act with thought, to carry responsibility more fully. That’s all I can do. And even knowing that, it terrifies me; the knowledge that the past will always exist, that the shadow of what I was may never fully leave me.
I don’t know if I will ever stop regretting who I was. Maybe I will carry this forever. But at least now I see it, and I feel it, and I try not to let it define who I am today, not completely anyway. I am flawed, deeply, but I really am trying.