Being Petty About Your Past Makes You Look Worse Than Anyone Else

There is a difference between being hurt by the past, and being petty about the past.

There is a difference between shedding light on wrongdoing, and poking fun at what you now perceive to be beneath you.

One is an honest way to heal, and to move forward.

The other is a thin veil over a bruised ego.

The honest truth is that when you are petty about the things that didn’t go the way you’d hoped in your life — first jobs, almost relationships, and so on — you make yourself look so much worse than anyone you think you’re insulting.

Life disappoints us all in some way, at some point.

This happens in more rapid succession at the start of our adult lives, and our bitterness about it tends to peak a few years afterwards.

We look back at the opportunities we wish we hadn’t taken, the mistakes we now realize we’d made, the people we invested in, the things we cared about.

It’s easier to mock them than to take responsibility for them.

It’s easier to paint them in a bad light than to risk someone else judging us for our missteps.

Being petty about the past does not make us appear as though we are over it, or above it. It has the opposite effect entirely.

Judging another person will never say more about them than it does about us.

It is so much more effective to extract wisdom from the situation, learn the lesson, and move forward.

It is so much more effective to let go, and build a great new life in the aftermath.

It is so much more effective to prove that we have grown from the past than to hint that we’re still not over it.

Airing your dirty laundry, especially for everyone to see, doesn’t help you clean it up.

It doesn’t allow you to move on.

It proves that you’re still the same person you were when you made the mistakes initially. It proves that you’re someone who is so embarrassed by the past there is no option but to put it down.

All you’re doing is putting yourself down in the process.

If you had an experience you need to speak out about — do that if you have a good reason to. If you had an experience that you need to get closure on — get it in private. If you had an experience that you need to vent about — share it with your close friends.

Please stop thinking that every person who rejected you is a loser, every poor decision you made was really someone else’s fault, that everything you couldn’t succeed at is fundamentally flawed.

Please stop thinking that being petty about your past is making you look like you went through a glow up and have clarity now.

All it does is make you look like you tripped and never really got up.