Childhood is a Lifelong Burden

Childhood is, unavoidably, unavoidable on the path to becoming an adult. Both a blessing and a curse, everything that happens to you in the first years of life will stick in your mind, coming back, consciously or unconsciously, to haunt and influence you in all the decades that follow. Without intervention, you will fall into a pattern of reliving your formative years, including all the high and lows, from which you learned to behave.

When you were young and sensitive, your emotional peaks showed you how to respond to the world. Positive and negative extremes gave you healthy limits, at least for a time. The longer you lived, the more those limits turned unhealthy because they remained rooted in outdated information. You became a child navigating an adult body, unable to see beyond what settled in your mind so many years ago. You must now go inward, back to your past, to reinterpret yourself.

Be cautious of how your early influences affected you. Whether you had an overall positive or negative childhood, nostalgia,  when mismanaged, will be an enemy to your progress. Longing for simpler, bygone days places a permanent cap upon your present. No differently, lamenting over the traumas suffered in years past condemns you to relive them. You should be moving on to bigger and better sources of pain.

Exceptional people raised in ordinary environments will always suffer. Your parents did not know how to raise you. They could not even conceive of what you were. Your other environmental factors had been built around ordinary social norms. They were not what you needed for optimal development. You cannot allow their influence to continue if you are to be as exceptional as you can be. You have to forgive those who reared you so you can move forward and decide, on your own terms, what kind of person you are going to be. Then they cease to matter.

Separating your present from your past is the first crucial step in the long journey to arrive where you already are. If that seems unclear, it is because you are so engrained with your past that you cannot see that it represents only a tiny fraction of what you can become. The more you experience, the larger you grow. Keeping your upbringing as a reference map for reality confines you to known territories. Because you had no external perspective as child, whatever you arbitrarily experienced first was given priority in the hierarchy of your mind.

When you’ve learned how to distance yourself from your childhood influences, you’ll be able to select only the most useful memories for your repertoire of self. Then you can test these claims against the nature of the world. Some will pass. Many others will fail, and should be promptly discarded. Early exposure is just the starting place to begin the validation process. You will learn from these observations and piece together your own unique and  personal worldview, one block at a time.

This is how you construct a mindset. Mindset determines everything that follows.