Dear DR,

I am you. I am everything you have done, imagined will happen and watched go wrong through your life so far. You have loved and lost without even telling them because of me. You have had opportunities there that could have been brilliant, yet you just watched them float by. I show you the times you ignored me and took those opportunities. I am a feeling that doesn’t go away. You are convinced you need me, for without me, you are nothing.

I haunt you. I am always there. I’m that voice in the back of your mind. “Remember when this happened?” or “don’t do that- remember how you felt?” This is what you need me for, to avoid feeling what has worked so hard to destroy you over the years. I haven’t been able to stop everything, yet it still remains a learning curve. You try to make changes, for me affecting your life leaves you with what feels like a familiar lack of meaning to what isn’t living, simply existing. I am forever showing you the familiar and the feelings of comfort it brings. You hate me for it, for it leads to a limiting existence you try to avoid living to. I have destroyed surprise to you.

Surprise is just a shock for something happening you missed, or couldn’t predict. You live in these mistakes because of me, you need me. I am, in a way, your guardian angel. We are, together, protecting you from the world and all of the terribly painful experiences, be it around people or not, that could hugely dampen a perfectly good mood, or utterly destroy a perfectly high level of resolve. I do this, to protect you from pain, from feeling like you cannot control you own destiny.

You wonder whether you live in the past too much, concentrating on your mistakes with almost a reluctance,  living so fearfully looking backwards through the amalgamation of errors you have mentally collected over the years, along with the feelings that have come with them.

This is the version of the past you remember, and is why i exist. You are the past, in a way. The decisions you have made, or not made, have stayed with you. The feelings, the critical moments of your past, the flashes of memory from those brilliantly powerful moments, the junctions of which life could have gone in 2 remarkably different directions, stay with you, as reminders. Reminders of your mistakes, for a feeling is infinitely more powerful than anything else in your world, in the past, present or future.

We need each other, for i show you the need for predictability, the failures that have shown you to stray from the obvious path may not be the best idea. We are at war though. The world is evolving and so are you with it, starting to wander outside of what “has” happened to what “might” happen. You spend so long in your mind because of me, glossing over the potential brilliance of life, and the brilliance of what previous experiences have given you, to find and overcome the details that kept you away from perfectionism, that “ultimate” you crave so badly.

Not being perfect is irrelevant, because its not possible. You cannot reach something that, as hard as you try, will be forever out of reach. So because of me, you don’t see the point in playing. In life, love, or anything. You sit bored and at times miserable because of me, refusing to move on for the fear that has driven you for so long its a familiar blanket to you. The unique qualities that define you are related to whats happened in the past. The past is everything, your “guide to being a better you.”

To not give the past so much attention, to respect it, but not assess it,  feels like you could be taking away from you those unique traits, those thoughts and feelings that give you such a rush, that you cannot explain, but right there and then, it just doesn’t matter, for only of that particular moment does.

You are worried forging forward risks losing what makes you, you.

Yours, with love as always.
DR

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