How Far Can My Compassion For My Past Self Go?

I’m thinking about my writing projects – more than I’m actually writing – but at least it now feels possible to write, as opposed to the final months of 2020 when it certainly didn’t.

I’m very stuck with my memoir project. The roadblocks and barriers loom large. What I don’t want it to be is much clearer than what I do want it to be.

When I broke up with my very serious (too serious) HS boyfriend, I kept all the letters and mix tapes and T-shirts and jewellery for a few years, until after I graduated from college. Our relationship was long-distance, for years. I was 14 when we started “going together” and 19 when I told him over the phone that I didn’t want to marry him, so we shouldn’t be together anymore. He was about to graduate from college and move to where I was to start a graduate program at my college. I broke up with him when I realized I didn’t want him to come.

But I had all these letters. Notebooks, actually. We were on separate continents, so we wrote our letters into notebooks and mailed them every time one was filled. I wrote about three times as much as he did. I kept them in a box but when I had graduated and was about to move to Bolivia, I couldn’t figure out what to do with them. I wrote and asked if he wanted them back, but he never responded. I tried to read them, thinking that I could learn something from revisiting the past. It was too hard. My dad seemed to think I should get rid of these things, just detritus, so I buried the box under an apple tree on my grandfather’s farm where I was living that summer.

I regretted it later, I still regret it. Some years later, when he’d been married to a very nice girl for several years, and I was still single, he wrote me and said he still had all the notebooks that I had sent him and did I want them back? And I kind of did, but also I didn’t. And since I didn’t have his notebooks anymore, I couldn’t offer an exchange.

I know there was art and poetry and recorded music in that box, which has I am sure disintegrated under what is now a corn field. Even though it was no longer valuable to me, and I have no desire to retrieve it, I think it probably had value to him, and compounds the loss of our relationship.

As I began to delve into memory two years ago, began to interview with classmates I hadn’t spoken to in a quarter century, I found so many gaps in my memory. Blank spaces where they recalled significant events – like the time one of my classmates drove his motorcycle to school past an unknown person who had recently died, left by the side of the road, likely by guerrillas – and when I talked with my ex-boyfriend, he remembered me writing to him about this at the time, but hearing the retelling now pinged no memory for me, now, zero, nothing, just a blank where the telling and retelling of it used to occupy some space in my neural network.

What else is missing? What could I have written in those notebooks as a teenager – so earnest, so pious, so full of angst – that I no longer have access to now?

My rationalization before, when I buried his notebooks and refused my own, was that whatever was meaningful and significant in our relationship was already inscribed in me, had already shaped me, and so it was ok to let go of these material artifacts.

When I re-read my college journals, which I have kept, it’s non-stop cringe. I was obsessively focused on another boy, on earning his love, on mastering and disciplining my yearning for him which I failed again and again to understand. I fear that re-reading those high school artifacts would be more of the same. I have great compassion now for that girl that I was, and I understand her better from the vantage point of now. She was a child.

So this is one of my mental blocks. How do I reckon with the loss of my written record of those years? With my destruction of my ex-boyfriend’s gifts? Can I forgive myself for burying that box under the apple tree? Can I forgive myself for breaking his heart? Can I forgive myself for staying in a stupid relationship for that long? How far can my compassion for my past self go?