Latest / Truth + Conversation / Truth + The Past
Transcript
- **Truth and the Past** Everybody’s got a past. But for a lot of people, the past is not simply something that happened. It becomes the explanation, the complaint, the identity, the stuckness, the entire structure of who they have become. In this episode, Gary responds to a listener who writes in saying she feels like a heartless asshole, does not know how to feel empathy, does not know how to love, and has spent years blaming her upbringing. But now, from listening to the show, she can see that explanation does not work anymore. That is where the conversation begins. Gary takes on one of the most misunderstood parts of his work: the idea that “your past is bullshit.” That might be where you end up after doing the work, but it is not where you get to start. You do not get to bumper sticker your way into freedom. If you have not examined the past, pulled it apart, looked at how you put it together, protected it, and kept living in its image, then calling it bullshit is just another way to avoid dealing with it. This is not about blaming yourself for what happened. It is about telling the truth about what you did with what happened. Most personal growth work focuses on what you ended up with: the anxiety, the anger, the disconnection, the inability to love, the lack of empathy. Gary takes an ontological approach. Instead of drawing a straight line from some event in your past to the life you have now, he looks at the amalgamation of decisions, meanings, interpretations, protections, and ways of being that came together to produce your life. What did you decide about yourself? What is your earliest memory of deciding that? What did you make it mean about you? What did you make it mean about them? What did you take from all of it? Those questions may sound simple, but they have to be answered to the bottom. Not with a polished answer. Not with a psychoanalytical category. With the brutal honesty of what you actually came up with at those moments in your life, and what has continued to echo through your existence ever since. From there, Gary turns to the listener’s claim that she does not know how to love or feel empathy. He makes a sharper distinction: she is not discovering that she has no empathy. She is beginning to see what it is like for other people to be around her. For many people, that is the doorway. We become so wrapped up in our own story, wounds, traumas, explanations, and complaints that we cannot see what it is like to be on the other side of us. But sometimes a conversation, a book, or a moment in life gives us a glimpse. And that glimpse can split the whole thing open. The deeper distinction is this: human beings cannot be a not-something. You cannot be not your past. You cannot be not weak. You cannot be not hurt. You cannot be not like them. You can only be something. And in trying so hard not to be something, many people become something they never intended. They become their own complaint. Love, in this conversation, is a function of vulnerability. Empathy is being vulnerable enough to connect yourself to another person’s world instead of living inside your own. You are not broken. There is nothing wrong. But you may be unexamined. Nietzsche warned about the memory of the past becoming “the gravedigger of the present.” That is exactly what this episode is about: not the past as memory, but the past as the thing that keeps burying what is possible now. Ontology is about unfolding. It is about expanding into life. It is not about fixing yourself. It is about becoming.