Your Past and Your Present, What About Your Future?

Living in the past is generally an unhealthy thing to do. Some of us can accept what happened and move on while others are generally caught up in regret and wish for a different outcome. I am no stranger in living in the past and in having difficulty moving on from what once was.

I been having trouble getting over a certain guy I was interested in and it is affecting me on a daily basis and also my relationships. I notice that I am always bringing this individual up in conversation and he seems to be on my mind more often than I would like him to be. Us going to the same school together makes it even harder for me to try to move on from what happened between the two of us. My friends have all told me that I need to occupy my time worrying about more important things. They also commented that he is an irrelevant person and that he isn't even worth the dirt on my shoe. While I do agree with what they are saying, I have become addicted to making him the villain in my life story.

Some of us find ourselves addicted to talking about the villains in our lives and giving the reason why they are the villains in our lives. This can be much like the psychological torment that Carrie experiences when she is trying to date Mr. Big in the HBO comedy series, Sex and the City. She is obsessed with talking about him with her friends even though they all agree on the same thing that he is not a good match for her and that she should just move on, she loves to antagonize him and talk about what he does to her that causes her torment. I find myself with doing the same thing with my own, real life, version of Mr. Big. Not only is obsessing over him unhealthy for me but it is also affecting my relationships in a significant way.

My last boyfriend would brought up to me that I was talking about "Mr. Big" way too much and that I could not enjoy what was right in front of me. I denied what he said, but after giving it some thought, I knew he was right. I was so caught up in antagonizing Mr. Big that I became blind to the man that was laying next to me in bed every night during our relationship. I brought this up with my therapist the other day at our session and she confirmed what my ex had said to me. When we are betrayed by someone we antagonize them and make them the worst person in our world, but what if that is our favorite topic of conversation? I wondered, are we really able to move on, or are we prisoners of our past?

What you do now can affect your future greatly. It can be something as small as deciding to study for a test or something major as deciding to have kids. We are all presented with the choices and situations that will affect our future and we choose to either try to think about the choices in depth or just go with our gut instinct. However, we don't need to think about the situations because the future can be presented to us in any kind of form.

I got a glimpse at my future when I was with my ex cuddling and watching a movie. I saw what was in front of me and I started to envision my future with him and how happy we could have been. I saw us together married, living in a house in the suburbs with our three kids (two boys and one girl) and we were living our career dreams. This showed me how my present life and reveal to me my future life. I saw how the man who loved me and treated me right built a stable life with me and how I was able to focus on myself as well with him by my side. I want this future, preferably with him. I know that it is hard now since we are no longer together. But I will still have hope that things will work themselves out in the future, since it is unpredictable. While thinking about this, I also realized that there are also unhealthy futures that we have the potential of falling into.

When thinking about my potential future, I started to think about one where Mr. Big and I ended up together in a relationship. The difference between my most recent ex and Mr. Big is the way I presented myself. With Mr. Big I had to keep up this entire facade and mask who I truly was as a person. If I had stayed with him, I would have to give up on who I was. I would be his personal Barbie doll, he could dress me how he saw fit and he could tell me how to act when we were in public. When I look back on it and I look at my life now, I realized how much I was willing to sacrifice to be with a man. Mr. Big is someone who I resent because he wanted me to be someone I wasn't. He wanted me to be completely devoted to him and at times, I would be his personal punching bag whenever things never went his way. However, I saw my life now in perspective when I had a chance encounter with him just today. I saw what he had accomplished and I saw what I had accomplished and I realized that my future was looking a lot brighter for me than it was for him.

Even though you cannot change the past, your future is still in your control and you can still shape it however you like. You should not have to rely on anything or anyone. When you do the right things now, your ideal future will fall into place like building blocks.