Things I Know Now That I Wish Someone Had Told Me Ten Years Ago

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the things I know now that I wish someone had told me 10 years ago. The funny thing is, I probably wouldn’t have listened to half of it anyway. Some lessons you really do have to learn for yourself. There are things I understand today only because I’ve made the mistakes, stayed too long, trusted people I shouldn’t have trusted, held onto things I should have released, carried anger, questioned myself, started over, and slowly figured out what matters to me. I had to come to the realization that I couldn’t keep living the same way and expect my life to feel different.

When I think about the woman I was ten years ago, I have a lot more compassion for her than I used to. I spent many years being angry with myself for the choices I made and the things I allowed, but I can see now that I was trying to survive myself just as much as I was trying to survive everything happening around me. I didn’t trust myself the way I do now. I looked outside myself for validation and spent too much time worrying about being loved, accepted, and understood. I carried things that weren’t mine and stayed in situations even when part of me knew they weren’t right. I didn’t have the same awareness that I do now, and I certainly didn’t have all the tools I’ve gained through the years of getting to know myself.

I’ve experienced enough trauma in my life to understand that surviving something and healing from it are two very different things. For a long time, I thought surviving was enough. You get through whatever happens, pick yourself up, and eventually enough time will pass and everything will be okay. What I didn’t understand was that our experiences don’t just disappear because they’re over. We carry them in the way we think, the relationships we choose, the way we speak to ourselves, the way we respond to conflict, and even in our physical and spiritual bodies. Healing has been the process of becoming aware of all of that and deciding what I want to continue carrying.

One of the biggest parts of that process was learning how necessary it is for me to be still and get quiet. There is so much noise in the world, and when you’ve spent years worrying about what people think or trying to anticipate everyone else’s needs, it becomes difficult to know which thoughts and feelings are yours. Meditation became a way for me to separate myself from all of that. It doesn’t have to be complicated or even look particularly spiritual. Sometimes I just need silence. I need to sit with myself, pray, breathe, ground my energy, and listen. That stillness has helped me understand the difference between what I genuinely feel and what I’m carrying because of someone else’s expectations, opinions, or projections. More importantly, it has become one of the ways I stay connected to God. Some of the greatest clarity I’ve experienced hasn’t come from seeking answers but from getting quiet enough to hear one.

My relationship with God has also changed the way I think about control. I didn’t realize for a long time how much control had become connected to safety for me. When you’ve experienced things that make life feel unpredictable, there is comfort in believing that if you can understand everyone, anticipate what happens, prepare for every possible outcome, and keep everything together, maybe nothing can catch you off guard. It was an exhausting way of living because life cannot be controlled. People make their own choices, plans fall apart, relationships change, and sometimes things happen that we could never have prepared ourselves for. My faith has slowly taught me that surrender doesn't mean giving up or becoming passive. For me, it means doing what I can, being responsible for my own choices, and then accepting that I am not God and I don't need to know how everything is going to turn out. I still struggle at times with that because I like answers, but I have found much more peace in trusting God than I ever found in trying to control everything around me.

I've also learned that you cannot build a peaceful life while constantly trying to please everyone around you. I think a lot of our younger years are spent trying to fit in because being accepted feels safe. We learn how to adjust ourselves depending on who is in the room, and eventually we can become so focused on how other people perceive us that we stop asking whether we even like the person we're becoming. There will always be someone who doesn't understand you. There will always be someone who thinks you should live differently, believe differently, speak differently, or make different choices. At some point, I had to accept that people are allowed to have their opinions about me, but I don't have to build my life around them. I care about being a good person. I care about the people I love. I care about my relationship with God. But whether everyone likes me is no longer something I'm willing to sacrifice myself for. People can love me or hate me, and either way I'm going to continue being me.

Something else I wish I understood much earlier is how connected our bodies are to healing. I hated the gym for the longest time, but after going consistently, I've realized that physical activity has given me much more than changes in how I look. There is confidence that comes from becoming physically stronger and keeping promises to yourself. You begin carrying yourself differently. You feel better, you have more energy, and for me, it created this natural desire to take better care of other areas of my life too. There is also something grounding about being physically present in your body when you've spent years living almost entirely inside your head. Trauma can make you constantly analyze, anticipate, remember, and prepare. Physical activity brings me back into my body and reminds me that my body isn't something I need to fight against. It's something I need to care for.

Learning to respect my body has also meant learning to listen to it. I've had relationships and situations where my body knew something wasn't right long before my mind was willing to admit what I already knew. I would feel that discomfort and immediately explain it away by telling myself I was overreacting, being too sensitive, or judging someone unfairly. Sometimes I wanted something to work so badly that I ignored what I was feeling. At the same time, I've had to understand that trauma can make the body respond to something happening in the present because it reminds us of something that happened in the past. Not every uncomfortable feeling means that I'm unsafe, which is why self-awareness has become so important. The more I've healed and gotten to know myself, the easier it has become to recognize when an old wound is being triggered and when something inside of me is genuinely saying, "This isn't right for you."

The same is true for what we consume. I spent many years dealing with depression and anxiety, and at some point those things became more than something I experienced. They became part of how I identified myself. Looking back, I can see how much I fed that identity without realizing it. It was in what I watched, what I listened to, how I spoke about myself, what I put into my body, the people I surrounded myself with, and the thoughts I repeated every day. I don't believe healing means pretending everything is positive or refusing to acknowledge darkness. Sometimes life hurts, sometimes people disappoint us, and sometimes terrible things happen that no amount of positive thinking will change. But I do believe we have to be honest about what we're feeding ourselves. You can't continuously consume things that make you feel hopeless, angry, afraid, or terrible about yourself and then wonder why you feel terrible. At some point, I had to stop asking why I wasn't changing and start looking at what I was doing every day that kept me the same.

That included the resentment I carried. There were years when I blamed other people for so much of what was wrong with me, and in some situations that blame wasn't completely misplaced. People hurt me. Things happened that should not have happened. Healing didn't require me to pretend otherwise. What I eventually realized, though, was that my anger wasn't hurting the people I was angry with. I was the one carrying it around. I was replaying the conversations and remembering the betrayals while those people were living their lives. They were taking up space in my mind rent-free.

That changed the way I understand forgiveness. I don't think forgiveness means saying that something was okay when it wasn't, and I don’t think it means giving everyone access to you again. Sometimes forgiveness and boundaries must exist together. For me, forgiveness became much more about releasing my need to keep carrying the story. I learned to pray for people I was angry with and ask God to bless them, which was incredibly difficult in the beginning. Eventually, I started asking God to change me too. That was probably the more important prayer. I spent years wanting other people to be different before realizing that my peace couldn't depend on whether they ever changed.

I've had to learn the same thing about the relationship I have with myself. We really can be our own worst enemies. There is a part of me that knows who I am, recognizes my gifts, encourages me, and pushes me toward the life I want. There is also a part of me that can tell me I'm not enough, that I should stay small, that people will judge me, or that I shouldn't try because I might fail. For a long time, I treated every thought in my head as though it were true. Shadow work helped me understand that some of those thoughts come from fear, ego, old wounds, and versions of myself that learned certain behaviors because they were trying to survive.

I don't think the answer is to hate those parts of ourselves either. If anything, I've learned to have more compassion for them. There are behaviors and beliefs I developed for very good reasons at different points in my life. They protected me when I didn't have better tools. But something protecting you at twenty doesn't necessarily mean it should be running your life at thirty or forty. I can understand where a fear comes from without letting that fear make every decision for me. Learning the difference between my intuition, my faith, my fear, and my old wounds has probably been one of the biggest parts of my healing.

This is also why I believe so much in changing the way we speak to ourselves. Affirmations can sound silly until you realize you've probably been practicing negative affirmations your entire life. Every time you tell yourself you're stupid, unattractive, broken, unlovable, incapable, or destined to fail, you're reinforcing a belief. I did that for years without calling it an affirmation. It was just the way I talked to myself. So yes, I believe repeating something different for fifteen minutes a day can begin to change you. Not because saying "I am worthy" magically fixes your life, but because you're finally challenging the beliefs you've repeated for years without questioning them. Our thoughts become patterns, and our patterns influence the choices we make.

Maybe the biggest thing I've learned is that healing isn't about becoming the person I was before everything happened to me. For a long time, healing sounded like getting back to some previous version of myself, but I don't want to go backward anymore. Every version of me got me here. Even the versions I used to be ashamed of were doing the best they could with what they understood at the time. I can look back now and have compassion for the woman who stayed too long, made bad choices, didn't trust herself, carried anger, struggled with her mental health, or looked outside herself for things she needed to find within. I don't have to remain her, but I also don't have to hate her.

And after everything I've experienced, I've somehow come to one conclusion that is both incredibly spiritual and incredibly simple: we're all just making this shit up as we go.

None of us actually has all of the answers. We're trying to understand God, consciousness, love, death, trauma, relationships, purpose, and what any of this means. We develop beliefs, change them, learn something new, realize we were wrong, and try again. We're all hypothesizing our existence and throwing shit at the wall, hoping some of it sticks. The older I get, the less interested I am in pretending I know everything and the more interested I am in actually living.

I want to love the people I love. I want to take care of my body and mind. I want to continue healing the parts of myself that still need attention. I want to sit quietly with God and listen. I want to trust myself when something doesn't feel right. I want to forgive people without giving them permission to hurt me again. I want to change my mind when I learn something new. I want to laugh, create, write, help people when I can, and experience this life instead of spending all of it trying to figure out whether I'm doing it correctly.

Ten years ago, I thought healing would eventually turn me into someone who had everything figured out. Instead, healing has made me much more comfortable admitting that I don't. I just know myself better now. I know what peace feels like. I know what it feels like when I'm abandoning myself, and I'm much quicker to recognize it. I know that God has carried me through things I once thought I would never survive. I know that I can experience pain without allowing it to become my entire identity.

Most importantly, I've learned that what happened to me is part of my story, but it doesn't get to decide how the story ends. I can take what I've lived through and turn it into something useful. I can let it make me softer instead of harder, wiser instead of bitter, and more willing to love instead of more afraid of being hurt.

Maybe that's what all of this has been teaching me anyway. We're here for a short amount of time, and none of us knows exactly what we're doing. So live your life. Learn yourself. Take care of yourself. Forgive what you can. Give the rest to God. And above everything else, learn how to love.

I really do believe love is all that we need.