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“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” — William Faulkner
I’ve thought about these words from Faulkner in reference to the temporal space between events in his book. The more I think on the quote, the more I realize these words are not only relevant but true. Everything that happened in our past is not dead, and not even in the past. It made us who we are now.
Don’t ever tell yourself that something that happened or something you did didn’t matter. No matter how insignificant others might tell you something is, despite how much your loved ones plead you to move on, perhaps the dwelling and ruminating on some form of shame and guilt you feel is what you need. Everything matters at the end of the day, and it’s up to you to decide for yourself, not anyone else. You or your God are the definers of your journey and life, and although the quote that “definitions belong to the definers, not the defined,” that Toni Morrison once said in Beloved refers to slaves having their definitions defined by white slaveowners, the novel is triumphant. By the end, the roles are reversed: the former slaves became the definers, instead of the defined, of their own story.
And yet we live in contradictions and paradoxes, that although there’s a part of us that dwells and feels, there’s also a part of us…
