So you know how you’ve got all these awesome memories of when everything was fucked? And they just play on a loop on repeat inside your head, and even though you’d love to “let them go” as so many unhelpful assholes advise, you just can’t seem to stop the cycles?

Thing is, those little side reels of your worst moments are actually the biggest help when managing your depression. Because when we remember painful moments, they’re the perfect guide for figuring out what our hurt triggers are, how we can avoid them going forward, and sometimes how we can set them right in the past. Our memories can serve as a map of our pain, and help us retrace our steps to figure out the causes of our current misery.

It goes back to this whole “forgive and forget” thing. Why? Remembering the things that hurt us is fucking useful. Particularly if those things are patterns of behavior in other people. Maybe you can’t or don’t want to put in the effort to making people change their need to take shit out on you, which makes sense, and remembering who those people are and what bullshit they do makes even more sense.

Now, sometimes it seems pointless because the trauma is so far past, that really, what the fuck can you do about it now? Well that’s just the thing, if you were actually done with it, and if the pain was gone, would you be carrying it around in your records? Psst. The answer is no. When you have memories of painful experiences, and you still feel something when you think of it, shame, humiliation, fear, anger, you’ve got an open wound. And if you want to get that to a sense of neutrality, you’ll need to find a way to reframe and move forward.

Sometimes that reframe is just a matter of laughing at yourself. Because fuck it. It’s funny to watch your past self mess up. Not in a mean way. Just in a “Yeah, that was pretty awful, glad that’s over” way. And sometimes you’ve got something meta going on with that memory, and really you’re hung up on that bully trash talking you because you felt like you had no voice, not just the act itself. Then the reframe may need some action, like a present day assertion of your voice and being heard and something something something. Point is. You’ve got those memories for a reason. Figure out why, and you can address some of that calcified pain you’ve got saved up in those memory banks.

So yeah the bad memories are… bad. And they’re not necessarily going to get any better. Still, holding the frames up to the light and taking a good look at them can give you some clues on how to manage and possible mediate the misery. That’s something. It’s quite a lot actually.