Returning Home

There’s something eerie about unearthing an old social media account of yours, some digital relic from a past self that still lingers in the quiet corners of the internet. You scroll through it and see the half-forgotten posts and fractured thoughts immortalized in pixels. And as you sift through the debris, a realization settles over you: you have not changed one bit.

The reflection staring back at you from those old posts is not a stranger, nor is it an outdated version of yourself in need of revision. It is you, unfiltered, unrefined, the raw essence that has pulsed through your existence long before you ever tried to mold it into something more palatable.

I say all this because I came across my own ghost last night, buried deep in an old Tumblr account (remember Tumblr?) from over a decade ago. The voice was unmistakable. Moody, introspective, bursting with feelings too big to be contained. I started to laugh as I realized I have always been this person, carrying the same thoughts, the same emotional storms, the same instinctive pull toward certain ideas and beliefs. The difference is, with time, I have only found new ways to articulate them.

For years, we convince ourselves that transformation is necessary. We tell ourselves that what we are feeling is not normal, we bend and stretch ourselves into shapes we believe will fit the grand narrative of who we are supposed to become. We chase reinvention as if the person we were before is something to be shed, something inferior. And yet, the more we run, the more we loop back to the place we started, only now with the added weight of unnecessary struggle and lost time.

Life is not about constructing a new self but about returning to the one that has always been there, waiting patiently beneath the surface. We mistake growth for departure, assuming we must abandon parts of ourselves to move forward, but in truth, it is the opposite. It is not about becoming someone else but in refining who you have always been, in understanding that the core of you is not a problem to be solved but a foundation to be honoured.

The past self we try so desperately to outgrow often holds the key to our most authentic existence. There was wisdom in that younger version of you. Reckless, unguarded, fearless in expression, but unmistakably real. Maybe you didn’t always get it right, maybe you were emotional, maybe you were naive, but you were unburdened by the exhausting performance of trying to be something you’re not.

To truly accept yourself is to recognize that no matter how far you travel, you are always carrying the same essence within you. And that is not something to fear, but something to embrace. The sooner we make peace with this, the lighter the burden of existence becomes.

We do not need to endlessly reinvent. We do not need to escape ourselves. We simply need to return home.

And when we do, we find that we always had a place in this world.

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