Going through more than twenty years of my old blog posts has been one hell of a trip.

I’ve laughed. I’ve cringed. I’ve gotten angry. I’ve cried. I’ve even found myself staring at the screen thinking, Rae, honey, what in the actual hell were you doing?

Some posts made me incredibly proud of the woman I was. Others made me want to reach through time, grab her by the shoulders and say, “Put the keyboard down. Walk away from the internet.”

But I kept reading.

Somewhere between the heartfelt confessions, questionable decisions, spiritual revelations, family drama and enough emotional processing to fill several lifetimes, something started happening.

I began seeing patterns.

When you read one old blog post, you remember a moment. You remember where you lived, what job you had, what was happening in your marriage, what you believed, what you were worried about, or possibly what unfortunate hairstyle you were convinced looked fabulous.

When you read hundreds of posts spanning years, though, you get a completely different view.

Eventually those patterns stop being subtle. They kick down the front door, throw their purse on the kitchen table and announce, SURPRISE, BITCH! YOU’VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR YEARS.

Well, isn’t that delightful?

Nothing like your own archives arriving with receipts.

Before anybody gets worried—especially you, Vickie—no, I am not climbing back onto the cycle and pedaling again. I’m also not sitting in the muck, examining it, analyzing its texture and determining whether it was really as disgusting as I remember.

Spoiler alert: it was.

I’ve lived it. I’ve learned from it. I’ve survived it. Some of it even made me better, although I would have preferred a gentler curriculum. Maybe a workbook. A tasteful seminar. A pamphlet titled Please Stop Doing This Shit to Yourself.

Apparently life was fresh out of pamphlets.

The point of looking backward isn’t to move backward. It’s finally being able to see the road I traveled—the potholes, detours, wrong turns and places where I probably should have turned around but kept going because apparently I needed to personally inspect every bad decision.

I can look at it now without climbing back into it.

That matters.

Apparently I Thought I Was a Fixer-Upper

One of the biggest patterns I found was how often I was trying to improve myself.

There was always something that needed fixing, healing, releasing, forgiving, adjusting or dragging into the emotional repair shop. I needed to become more confident, more positive, more forgiving, more disciplined, more spiritual, more productive, more peaceful, better with boundaries, better with relationships, better with money and better with my emotions.

Meanwhile, I was supposed to become less angry, less sensitive, less reactive, less concerned about what other people thought and probably less likely to tell someone to kiss my ass.

That last one never really took.

Thank the Goddess.

For years, I treated myself like an HGTV project with no final inspection date.

Welcome to Fixer Upper: Rae Edition.

This week we’re knocking out the wall of anger, installing some new boundaries and covering the people-pleasing with shiplap. Next week we’re renovating her entire personality because somebody somewhere might not approve.

The problem wasn’t wanting to grow. I still want to grow. I hope I’m learning until I’m old, gray and yelling at somebody to get off my lawn.

The problem was believing growth always required finding something wrong with me first.

Sometimes growth does mean changing. Sometimes it means healing something that hurts. But sometimes growth means looking at yourself and realizing, Wait a damn minute. There wasn’t anything wrong with me here.

That’s been one of the better discoveries.

Maybe I’m not a fixer-upper.

Maybe I’m a whole damn house.

There will always be something I want to paint, rearrange or toss into a dumpster because I’ve changed my mind about it. That’s life.

But I don’t have to spend the rest of it under construction.

I can actually live here.

People-Pleasing Has a Terrible Return Policy

Oh, the people-pleasing.

Past Rae could take one uncomfortable situation and turn it into a full-time position with unpaid overtime and absolutely no benefits.

If someone hurt me, I needed to understand why. Then I needed to consider what they were going through. Then I needed to examine my own behavior because apparently their bad behavior was somehow a group project.

Maybe I misunderstood.

Maybe they were having a difficult time.

Maybe I should reach out.

Maybe I should apologize.

Maybe I should give them another chance.

And another.

I handed out chances like free samples at Costco.

Before long, I wasn’t merely carrying my own emotional baggage. I was labeling everyone else’s, organizing it and making sure they had a comfortable place to store it.

Eventually, of course, I’d reach my limit.

BOOM. Jersey entered the building.

Suddenly I wasn’t worried about keeping the peace because the peace had packed a suitcase, flipped me off and left three exits ago.

Then came the ridiculous part: I felt guilty for being angry.

So naturally, I started examining myself again. Was I too sensitive? Was I overreacting? Had I misunderstood? Should I apologize for having feelings about the thing that hurt me?

And around we went.

Looking back, I can see that anger wasn’t necessarily the problem.

Sometimes anger was the smoke detector.

Instead of asking why the alarm was screaming, I kept taking out the batteries because somebody else found the noise inconvenient.

I don’t do that anymore.

If something inside me starts screaming that there’s smoke in the house, I’m checking for fire.

I Was Doing Everyone Else’s Homework

This cycle was everywhere in the archives, especially when it came to relationships.

I could turn somebody else’s behavior into an entire independent study program.

What did I do?

What could I have done differently?

Should I forgive?

Should I apologize?

Should I reach out?

Should I explain myself one more time, perhaps using smaller words and interpretive dance?

Apparently, I was prepared to put myself on trial, prosecute the case, serve as my own defense attorney and then sentence myself to emotional community service while the other person sat comfortably in the audience contributing absolutely nothing except the original problem.

There is a difference between examining my own behavior and assuming responsibility for somebody else’s.

Sometimes I was wrong. Sometimes I needed to apologize. Sometimes I needed to grow up, calm down, shut up or own my shit.

And sometimes?

The other person was simply being an asshole.

No workbook required.

For a long time, though, understanding someone’s behavior became my excuse for tolerating it. If they were hurting, maybe I needed to be more patient. If they had a difficult past, maybe I needed to make room for what they were doing. If I understood why they behaved that way and I was still upset, apparently I had more personal growth to do.

I was running an emotional rehabilitation center out of my own nervous system.

The hours were terrible.

Eventually I learned that understanding someone doesn’t require me to keep standing in the line of fire. People can have reasons for behaving the way they do. I can understand those reasons, have compassion for what they’ve experienced and still decide I don’t want their behavior in my life.

Those things can exist together.

Compassion does not require self-abandonment.

I can forgive someone without handing them the matches, and I can stop blaming myself for not leaving sooner—for ignoring the first red flag, explaining away the second and convincing myself the third was probably just a decorative banner.

Sometimes I stayed until the entire damn parade marched past carrying signs that said, Rae, get the hell out.

Hindsight is a real smug little bitch.

It’s easy for Current Rae to look backward with years of experience and say, “Well, THAT was obvious.” Past Rae didn’t have everything I know today. She was making decisions while she was inside the situation.

The lesson isn’t that I should have known better.

The lesson is that I know better now.

I don’t need to prove that someone intended to hurt me before I take my pain seriously. Intent may explain something, but it doesn’t erase the impact. My experience matters, and somebody else’s refusal to be accountable doesn’t mean I need to become their detective, therapist, defense attorney and unpaid publicist.

They can keep their excuses.

I have my peace to get back to.

Somebody else’s chaos is not automatically my calling, and sweet baby Hecate, I had enough of my own damn assignments without accepting extra credit for somebody else’s.

I can forgive without granting unlimited access. I can understand without excusing. I can wish someone healing without appointing myself the person responsible for providing it.

Forgiveness does not come with a complimentary lifetime membership to my nervous system.

Sometimes the lesson is much simpler than I used to make it: somebody made a choice, that choice hurt me, and I wasn’t responsible for fixing what they broke.

No committee meeting. No twelve-page explanation. No closing argument before the jury of people who weren’t there.

If somebody throws a mess at my feet, I’m not required to grab a mop, put on an apron and host a seminar called How We Got Here.

Sometimes I can step over it and keep walking.

And sometimes I can wish them well from a safe distance—preferably one with a locked gate and excellent snacks.

Chaos Was Familiar, but That Doesn’t Mean I Loved It

There are stretches of these archives where I honestly wonder how we kept going.

Money problems, family problems, work problems, relationship problems, health scares, grief and housing problems seemed to take turns showing up at the door. One fire would finally go out and another would start smoking in the corner.

And I got good at handling it.

Really damn good.

Give me a crisis and apparently I could MacGyver that sucker together with caffeine, sarcasm and sheer stubbornness.

That’s survival.

When you live that way long enough, though, survival starts feeling normal. Then something strange happens when life finally becomes quieter.

You start looking around suspiciously.

What am I forgetting? Who needs something? What bill didn’t get paid? What catastrophe is hiding behind the couch?

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Apparently, we’re just having Tuesday.

Learning how to live without constant chaos became its own lesson. Peace initially felt unfamiliar because I had spent so much time responding to emergencies. That didn’t mean I secretly loved drama. It meant my normal meter needed recalibrating.

I learned that I don’t need an emergency to justify resting. Everything doesn’t need to fall apart before I’m allowed to stop, and silence doesn’t automatically mean something terrible is coming.

Sometimes nothing happening is the entire point.

And you know what?

It’s actually rather lovely.

Sweet Baby Hecate, the Reinventions

Then we have the names.

The blogs. The usernames. The themes. The taglines. The fresh starts. The grand declarations that THIS IS WHO I AM NOW.

Good grief.

If every version of me had a name tag, we’d need a conference center.

Going through the archives and finding all those identities could have made me look at them as evidence that I didn’t know who I was.

I don’t see them that way.

I wasn’t fake.

I wasn’t pretending.

Those women were me.

Every damn one.

My life changed. My beliefs changed. My circumstances changed. I learned things and unlearned things. I loved people. I lost people. I got hurt. I healed. I got pissed off. I started over.

Sometimes reinvention probably was an attempt to escape something I didn’t know how to deal with yet.

Other times, reinvention was exactly what I needed.

It was growth.

So I’m not interested in dragging Past Rae through the streets for crimes against blog naming.

Although seriously, woman…

We owned a LOT of domain names.

Even My Spiritual Life Had Its Cycles

Reading my Christian-era writing has been fascinating.

I don’t look at those posts and think that woman was fake.

She wasn’t.

I believed what I wrote. That was my life and my spiritual path then, and I’m not going to rewrite my own history simply because my path looks completely different today.

But distance allows me to see things I couldn’t see while I was living them.

There was a constant desire to become better. Pray more. Trust more. Forgive more. Surrender more. Release anger and bitterness. Study harder. Grow. Recommit. Start again. Become the woman I believed I was supposed to be.

Then regular Rae inevitably showed up again—opinionated, sarcastic, questioning, stubborn, emotional, curious and wild.

Apparently she needed another tune-up.

Eventually I learned something much bigger than changing spiritual paths.

I learned to stop treating myself like a spiritual problem that needed solving.

I can honor the woman who believed differently without needing to become her again. She was part of my story. She taught me things. Some beliefs stayed, others fell away, and some went flying out the window at approximately seventy miles per hour.

That’s life.

My spirituality doesn’t need to erase my past to be real in the present.

And I don’t need somebody else’s permission to trust what I know in my own bones.

That lesson took a while.

Damn, it was worth learning.

I Thought Strength Meant How Much I Could Take

For years, strength meant endurance.

I’ve survived worse. I can handle this. I’ll figure it out. I’ll get through it.

Keep going.

Don’t quit.

There were times when survival absolutely was the victory, and I’m never going to disrespect the woman who got me through those years by pretending she should have magically known everything I know now.

She did what she knew how to do.

She kept us moving.

But eventually I had to reconsider my definition of strength.

Strength isn’t measured by how much bullshit I can tolerate before collapsing.

Sometimes strength is leaving sooner. Saying no earlier. Recognizing a familiar pattern before it becomes another chapter. It’s not explaining myself for the eighteenth time or trying to convince someone to understand something they’re committed to misunderstanding.

Sometimes strength isn’t dramatic at all.

Sometimes it’s simply, No. I’m not doing this again.

That doesn’t make Past Rae weak.

It means Current Rae learned from her.

There’s a difference.

The Woman Usually Knew

This may be the biggest thing the archives have shown me.

Somewhere underneath all the analyzing, praying, writing, questioning, venting, apologizing, forgiving, raging and starting over, I usually knew when something wasn’t right.

I knew when I was exhausted. I knew when a relationship was unhealthy. I knew when I was giving too much, shrinking myself or trying too hard to make something work. I knew when something no longer fit and when I had finally had enough.

I didn’t always know what to do about it.

That’s different.

And I didn’t always trust myself enough to believe what I was feeling.

That may be one of the most valuable lessons buried inside all these old posts.

My intuition wasn’t absent. My trust in it was.

Now when that little voice speaks, I’m much more inclined to listen before she needs a megaphone, flashing lights and a parade permit.

I’m Not Going Back There

Going through these archives isn’t about sitting around mourning every mistake I’ve made since dial-up internet.

Gods, we’d be here forever.

I’m not ashamed of the cycles. I’m not ashamed that some took years to break, or that sometimes I went around the same mountain several times before realizing, Wait…haven’t I seen that damn tree before?

Life doesn’t hand you the lesson plan first.

Usually it gives you the test, watches you swear at it, lets you fail spectacularly and then hands you another version six months later.

Eventually, hopefully, you catch on.

What matters to me now isn’t how many times I repeated something.

It’s that I eventually recognized it.

I learned.

That’s why I refuse to sit in the muck. The muck served its purpose, and some surprisingly beautiful things grew out of it.

I learned boundaries. I learned resilience. I learned that peace doesn’t have to be earned and forgiveness doesn’t require unlimited access. I learned that love doesn’t require self-abandonment, anger can carry useful information, and changing my mind doesn’t make me a hypocrite.

I learned that surviving and living are two very different things.

Most importantly, I learned to trust myself.

So, Vickie, you can relax.

I’m not getting back on the cycle, strapping on a helmet, adjusting the seat and announcing another Tour de Trauma.

Been there. Pedaled that.

Got the emotional chafing to prove it.

I’m standing over here now, looking at that old bicycle and appreciating where it carried me.

Because those years weren’t wasted.

Those women weren’t wasted.

The mistakes weren’t wasted.

Every version of me learned something and carried the next version a little farther down the road. I don’t have to hate the woman who stayed too long to appreciate the woman who knows when to leave. I don’t have to be embarrassed by the woman who searched outside herself for answers to appreciate the woman who finally learned to trust herself.

And I don’t have to crawl back into an old life just because I’m looking at pictures of it.

I can love the woman I was without becoming her again.

I can acknowledge the muck without sitting in it.

I can remember the cycles without pedaling them.

Maybe that’s the real lesson buried inside more than twenty years of my own words.

I wasn’t going in circles after all.

It just looked that way from inside the ride.

Turns out, I was learning how to find my way home.