MSI Press Blog

You are not your past When you are asked to describe yourself, you probably do what most of us do and describe your history of experiences, roles, and accomplishments. Those are the things through which we build a self-concept. As a child, perhaps you were a fast runner, or maybe you were the last kid picked. Whichever was the case, your mind made up a story about the meaning of those things. You identified as a certain gender (or perhaps as none). You were good at math and sciences or maybe hated writing. The list goes on. These experiences eventually built up into an icon of who you see as yourself. It is how you know yourself. But that is not who you are—not in the least. Most of what we think is our past are not the events of our lives but the memories we have about them. A friend of ours (we’ll call her Rachel) was physically and sexually abused by an adult neighbor as a thirteen-year-old girl. It was a horrible and degrading set of experiences that no one should ever have to