How to let the past go? (a.k.a accept when I'm wrong?)

[Icey!]

I've been struggling with myself image for a very long time and it seems that I care overly too much about it. Deleting posts I dislike, worrying about things I've said in the past and doing the exact opposite and feeling like a hypocrite. It's getting to the point where other people are noticing me hiding things, one of them even asked me how I was even going to handle relationships. It's also possible that I'm the reason why you can no longer delete your topics on this forum as I did that constantly back then.

Like how am I not supposed to feel bad for the many times I've probably harassed someone in the past over useless shit only to do the same thing years later? No one likes hypocrites, but why should I have to suffer from an old me that no longer represents the future? No one has ever told me how to handle past memories about that.

The solution should be simple, but I don't exactly know what that solution is. Is this happening because I lack friends or don't talk enough? Is this happening because I don't have many things to worry about and need something to do to give me a reason to worry about the future rather than the past? Is this happening because of a hyperfixation? Is this happening because I am a perfectionist (which is a thing I am trying to deprogram)?

For a lack of a better term, how do I let the past go so I don't have to do all that deleting?

[bingus_baby]

Letting go of the past is something I myself struggle with, so I can't weigh in too much. But what I can try to help with is how to make a better future moving forward. The main thing that helps me on the internet is to THINK. (It's one of those posters teachers have in their classrooms!) It's hard to do irl, since I talk faster than my brain, but it does work very very nicely online! After you type out whatever your working on and before you hit the post button...

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I used to comment whatever I felt because I didn't realize how it came across and how inane most of what I said was. Social media comments don't encourage thoughtful discussions and got me into bad habits!!!! Nowadays I try to post less, and be more thoughtful when I do it. If it doesn't meet the above criteria, I don't post it! (Unless I'm talking to friends, and then of course it will be more casual.)

I can't erase the past (mostly) but I can make an honest to god effort to be better in the future. And I think that's what matters! It's also worth considering your intentions. It sounds like you mean well with improving yourself, which is already a good sign. Just also consider why you want to leave the past behind. Knowing your motivations and goals will help to plan out how to get there.

If your past is eating away at you that much, you should probably look into therapy or something. Trying to help yourself on your own is possible, but can ultimately create more problems than it creates if the problem is too big to handle on your own.

Sorry if I got too off topic, but I hope my post helps at least a lil bit!! ♡

[Memory]

[removed by author]

[Fish]

As someone who's had access to the internet since childhood, I have posted more embarrassing things than should be humanly possible. I can even remember some pretty nasty comments I've left on youtube during my edgelord middle school years. 

I got a bit older and eventually started feeling really bad about stuff I said and did when I was younger. I did what you did and started deleting a lot of stuff even if it wasn't actually harmful. I didn't want to be seen as 'cringey', ya know?

I kept feeling really guilty about all this stuff until I realized its just something that happens. What I mean by that is that doing or saying something stupid or cringe is inevitable. As you grow and learn, you're gonna realize that something you did a while back wasn't the best thing to say or do.

The best thing to help calm my anxieties about past mistakes is to try and think about what I'm doing now. There's nothing hypocritical about realizing you did something and trying to correct your behavior in the present! That's literally what life is all about. If you did hurt someone, take your time to reach out and apologize but if you can't you just need to focus on working to improve yourself.

Again, don't focus too much on the past! You're going to be saying and doing embarrassing stuff for your whole life, just do your best to be kind to yourself and others !   

[ralfwause]

Well, may it be online or offline, every person alive or dead has done some shit in his / her life that will haunt them till they go 6 feet under. I myself have posted online, and said in real life horrible stuff to so some persons that i otherwise really like and some of those things are still following me today.

In which way i do cope with that? Well... i think i am the person that i am now because of the experienced i made in my life. Would i be the person that i am now without hurting those people? Would i have been a better person? I don't know. What i DO know is, that the only thing one can do to find somewhat peace is to accept that you have done / said things that you regret now and use it as an learning experience for the future. So... its not so much about letting the past go as to learn from it and grow through that experience.

[Melooon]

. its not so much about letting the past go as to learn from it and grow through that experience

I would mirror this - letting go isn't about making the past go away; it's about incorporating it into your life, along with the lessons you learned on the way.

I'd also add that; often the regrets I have are about things that, at the time, I believed were good choices! I was wrong, and either myself or someone else was hurt by them, but at the time, the best of my knowledge told me that what I was doing would have a good outcome. That's not always true for everything, and it doesn't diminish the hurt that was caused, but maybe it helps as a sanity check to remember that making mistakes will feel bad, but they don't make you a bad person

[tarraxahum]

I don't know if I can exactly offer this as an advice, but in my head I almost see my younger selves as separate people. Not in the sense that I'm not responsible for or haven't learned from "their" actions, but in the sense that, well. I was a different person back then. Different, smaller pool of life experience, different emotions that were stronger and/or harder to process due to my brain structure at the time, ignorance about stuff I'm well versed in now. The latter often being due to limited amount of information being available to me. I was different then. I am different now, albeit built on top of what I was. That person was smaller and was going through some stuff and I forgive her (not on the expense of those I potentially hurt, of course, but I've since either apologized or got too far removed from people in question to pop back in just for an apology that's only meant to make me feel better about myself).

Going off of my own isolated experience, I'd dare to guess that most of us didn't go through "edgy phases" unprompted. Sure, maybe there are people who genuinely use being rude as their normal "healthy" self-expression, but I sort of doubt it? I have some periodic anger issues for example, they most likely stem from some part of me that I hadn't diagnosed. When I was younger and every damn emotion was too much, my edginess was just that. I felt angry for no reason, so I posted "cringy" stuff about being a murderous lone wolf and hitting people (never was in an actual fight in my whole life). When I got slightly older I ended up butting in every argument there was on the Internet (or even instigated some), because pouring all that aggression out on someone "asking for it" in the context felt good. Now I guess I stuff most of all that in my art - finally a healthy approach. When I was saying some frankly ignorant stuff I now shudder at I was just that - ignorant, uneducated. Etc etc.

None of that excuses some of my behaviors, but years later (and without, like, ruining anyone's life or doing any other horrible damage) it gives me enough grace to accept myself. She was small and angry and confused about so many things, and no one taught her how to deal with it. Of course she behaved like crap about it. And she had so much to learn still, of course they said some dumb stuff. I'm glad I'm grown now. Wonder what I'll cringe at about today's me ten years down the line.

Granted, at some point I also went through the phase of frantically deleting stuff, but I'll say I regret going overboard with it. Like, I wiped whole conversations, sometimes nuked whole social media pages. And now I've reached that age where I'm curious to look back at the old me, where I want to see what she breathed and what profile pics they had and what those awful dialogues looked like, but I can't, 'cause at some point I purged all "the cringe". Sigh.

[Icey!]

Liking the commentary so far! I will respond to a few posts here.

The main thing that helps me on the internet is to THINK. (It's one of those posters teachers have in their classrooms!) It's hard to do irl, since I talk faster than my brain, but it does work very very nicely online! After you type out whatever your working on and before you hit the post button...♡

Is your post/comment/etc...
True?
Helpful?
Inspiring?
Necessary?
Kind?

regardless of why, i treat my discomfort as a symptom of something. i suffer from a lot of the negatives of my autism and OCD, but i've learned to acknowledge that this is simply pain. the mental equivalent of the physical pain i feel when my back twinges. and, like my back, all pain eventually subsides and is only ever temporary.

Considering that I also fall under the autism spectrum I wonder to what extent that could be affecting me in this case. Even when I have a finished post and try to double check if I should do it, it literally takes hours to have my brain catch up and by then I've already posted it. Then I start worrying and rush to delete it.

Also thanks for the THINK poster, but I'm not sure if that will stop me from posting something absolutely embarrassing without realizing it's consequences. Although it might be better to think of this more as in "failing faster" or some other mindset as this might just be unavoidable and would be better to not worry about. (Basically just answered my own question at this point.)

Going off of my own isolated experience, I'd dare to guess that most of us didn't go through "edgy phases" unprompted. Sure, maybe there are people who genuinely use being rude as their normal "healthy" self-expression, but I sort of doubt it? I have some periodic anger issues for example, they most likely stem from some part of me that I hadn't diagnosed. When I was younger and every damn emotion was too much, my edginess was just that. I felt angry for no reason, so I posted "cringy" stuff about being a murderous lone wolf and hitting people (never was in an actual fight in my whole life). When I got slightly older I ended up butting in every argument there was on the Internet (or even instigated some), because pouring all that aggression out on someone "asking for it" in the context felt good. Now I guess I stuff most of all that in my art - finally a healthy approach. When I was saying some frankly ignorant stuff I now shudder at I was just that - ignorant, uneducated. Etc etc.

When I was around 11-13 I went threw a bit of a "perfectionist" phase which had me being a bit of an asshole to beginner artists, it's hard to describe what actually happened during that time but it wasn't fun considering how I kept trying to perfect everything, sometimes going as far as to start remaking other people's projects to "correct" their mistakes which only made them confused into how to continue. I do still sometimes look at other peoples work and think "I could have made that better" but that could just be motivation. My ego was just too big for me to handle I guess. I'm still suffering from the affects of that as I keep trying to perfect my art when I don't need to.

Granted, at some point I also went through the phase of frantically deleting stuff, but I'll say I regret going overboard with it. Like, I wiped whole conversations, sometimes nuked whole social media pages. And now I've reached that age where I'm curious to look back at the old me, where I want to see what she breathed and what profile pics they had and what those awful dialogues looked like, but I can't, 'cause at some point I purged all "the cringe". Sigh.

I have an old YT channel filled with content I don't like looking at, so I just keep them private. I've been thinking for a while if I should put the videos back up again or keep them private or just delete the channel all together. But the whole "looking back" seems like a very good argument for bringing everything back as thankfully I never deleted any of the videos. It's possible I might even lose access to the account one day so might as well do that!

[grubbyfox]

You can always just delete, remove, hide etc posts/things you've done online that you feel no longer fit you or you feel is wrong to post now, etc. For example, when I was in my early 20s, I posted a candid photo of some random guy in my town on my tumblr, because he looked like a celeb and stuff. Like just randomly crappy dumb-phone blurry potato-quality photo. I forgot about it for a long time, but realized it at some point later. I just went back and deleted it. Even if like only 2 people saw it, nobody would have recognized them or anything...morally it just felt wrong and I didnt agree with my own decision anymore. There's probably more stupid stuff like that... At one point I deleted all my facebook-albums and stuff cause it was just .... crap, ya know? Nobody needed like 200+ photos of me and my friends at random parties with random people who we didnt know who were, plastered on my page, etc.

But dont fret about cringy stuff, or like, random silly videos that are just that and completely harmless.
If the content is problematic (maybe you had opinions you disagree with now), or hurtful, or "doxing" of others, or just make you uncomfortable, I think it's completely fine to delete if you can.

If it's none of that, then what's the harm?