Is your past holding you back?

When I was 19, I got my first tattoo.

I was a girl who grew up in south-west Sydney and, truth be told, the company I kept in my teens weren't exactly model citizens.

In honour of all that, and my eventful life up until that point, this first tattoo was the Chinese character for 'courage'. I had to get it just underneath my hipster waistband to hide it from my parents. It's an ugly blob now, distorted by time and two pregnancies.

Courage.

It's something we all need at different times of our lives. Especially when we're trying to move on from the past. The past, with all its characters and events. All its memories, good and bad. All its feelings. The way it wires our brains.

The past is hard to forget because we know it. It's familiar. We've lived it. So it feels safer to live in than a future that doesn't exist yet.

But what if the past isn't as trustworthy as we think it is? When I was studying memoir writing I learned that two people who loved the exact same experience can remember it very differently. Whose version is the truth? Nobody will ever truly know because we cannot go back in time (not even AI can do this).

So if the past is subjective ... what are we holding onto?

It does take courage to let go of past hurts and the stories that we've created to make meaning from our lives. Letting go of the past isn't a sign of weakness. It's a signal to life that you are ready for new possibilities.

My courage these days comes from something far more powerful than ink on my skin. It comes from having experienced chaos, failure and heartbreak over and over and choosing to stand tall throughout it all.

Courage is the refusal to stay trapped in time and to move forward, even if it's slowly, one baby step at a time.

Are you ready to let go of something in your past and step forward into something greater? I would love to hear from you.