The art of strategic forgetting

How to leave the ghosts of your personal regret in a past you’ve outgrown

Gary Bloomer | SHAKING THE TREE # 283

Sometimes, forgetting is simply a matter of reframing your experiences.

If you regularly find yourself mulling over past mistakes and reliving long ago events you have no control over, it’s time to let go of the stories that no longer serve the person you’re becoming.

It’s time to leave your ghosts of regret in a past you’ve outgrown.

It’s time to embrace the art of strategic forgetting.

We’ve learned to carry the idea that personal growth is additive. That we need more and more of it to become who we’re meant to be.

We’ve been taught to believe that by stacking skills on top of experiences, by covering scars with lessons, and by transforming wounds into wisdom that we can magically become a newer, better version of ourselves.

We’ve been conditioned to imagine our past selves as the foundation—as the solid, immovable block, as the ever present anchor. Sadly, this is a beautiful lie. And it’s a heavy one.

Real emotional and personal growth isn’t about what you add to your life. It’s about what you’re brave enough and bold enough to subtract from the mix. It’s about a skill we’ve forgotten how to practice, that of strategic forgetting.

Instead of seeing yourself as a prisoner of your past, it’s time to start seeing yourself as its curator. By continually reliving the past all you’re doing is adding more and more artifacts to your personal museum collection, a collection dedicated to every failure, misstep, and mistake, every cringe-worthy moment and every poorly informed and underprepared version of you that somehow fell short of the mark.

By revisiting your past again and again all you’re doing is dusting the exhibits and polishing the plaques that read “Here lies the person who messed up that deal,” or “This is where you proved you weren’t good enough. Again!”

Every time you think back to some mishap, all you’re doing is giving yourself a guided tour of this emotional prison in which you spend too much time narrating your own limitations and reliving your own, long-since-past embarrassing mistakes.

It’s time to take down the exhibits and to take the artifacts, specimens, and objects off display. It’s time close the museum, lock the doors, and throw away the keys. Not to deny the past, simply to reclassify its contents.

Some of these items belong in permanent storage. Some of them belong in the trash. A select few items belong in a small, private study gallery for occasional study and reference. As for the rest of the building? It’s time for it to become prime real estate for the person you’re building now.

Strategic forgetting is not about contracting some sort of convenient emotional amnesia. It is not avoiding your past or ignoring it. Instead, is the focused, conscious, intentional, practical act of letting go of the stories that no longer serve the person you are becoming.

You are no longer the former version of yourself. That person no longer exists and any resemblance between you and them is purely coincidental. That person’s guilt, shame, fear, and self-judgment?

Let it go.

Those items of baggage are no longer yours and they are no your burden to carry. And right now, knowing what you know, having learned what you’ve learned, and heading where you’re heading, you are under no obligation to haul any of those bags through and into every new chapter of your life.

The practical guide to leaving your baggage behind

I am not a therapist and this is not therapy. What follows is based on my personal journey along a similar road. It’s intended as a series of auditing maintenance points and accounting tips to help you make your way towards lasting personal forgiveness through a process of enduring emotional redemption. Here’s how to start:

1. Identify the debt you’ve already paid.
That mistake from five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago? You’ve paid for it ten times over in feeling bad, in lost sleep, in eroded self confidence, and in an endless cycle of pointless self-flagellation, regret, self blame, and shame.

That debt is settled and needs “PAID IN FULL” stamped across that mental file folder it sits in. It needs to be archived and forgotten. Constantly paying emotional compounding interest on a closed account is bad business.

2. Conduct the “useful or just heavy?” test.
Hold up a past story—it doesn’t matter which one. It can be the one about the time you embarrassed yourself (been there), or the failures that “defined” you (done that), or the incident that haunts your thoughts on long cold afternoons (worn the t-shirt).

Ask one question: “Does my remembering this event right now make me wiser, or does it simply serve to make me weaker because it makes me feel bad?” Does this past story, whatever it is provide a specific, actionable lesson you can put to good use today?

Or does it just make you feel small, ashamed, and weak because it weighs you down? If it’s heavy, put it down. Wisdom is portable. Baggage is a burden.

3. Write the letter of release.
This is a physical, tangible act. It involves taking a piece of paper and writing a letter to your past self. This isn’t something you type in an email or in a text. It needs to be written down in ink on paper.

Thank your previous self for surviving and for learning from the hard lessons. Acknowledge your past self’s pain. Then, clearly state: “I am taking over from here. I am releasing us from this story. Your job is done.” Read it aloud. Then burn it, shred it, or rip it into tiny pieces and flush it down the toilet.

Here, both the physical act of writing the letter and the ceremony of its destruction matter. These two actions initiate a valuable release and signal a lasting change in personal management.

4. Re-narrate the evidence.
Image your mind is a courtroom where the past events of certain incidents are both the evidence against you and the prosecution looking to emphasize your lasting guilt.

Your role in the proceedings is to act as your own defense by taking that “failure” and finding the counter-evidence to counter the prosecution. Did the event teach you resilience? Did it steer you toward a better path? Did it, in fact, save you from something worse?

Argue for your own innocence from the charge of being “irredeemable.” You’ll find the verdict is usually based on misleading evidence, poorly interpreted witness testimony, and flawed reasoning.

5. Create an amnesia hour.
For one focused hour each week, consciously decide to forget your past limitations. In this hour, operate as if you are the person you are becoming—confident, capable, unburdened, refined, informed. Then, draft the proposal you’ve been scared to write because you thought it was too grandiose or far beyond your abilities.

Make the call you’ve been avoiding because it’s too painful to contemplate. In that hour, your past résumé is irrelevant. What you’ll discover is that that person already exists; all you’re doing is giving them permission to exist and room to breathe.

6. Forgive the protagonist.
Self-forgiveness isn’t a grand, emotional catharsis. It’s a quiet administrative decision. It’s looking at the old file and saying, “Given the information, resources, and emotional state I had at the time, I made the best call I could, even though, looking back, it wasn’t the right decision. Therefore, and with the benefit of hindsight, I hereby overrule the old judgment.”

Judging your past self by your present awareness is a logical fallacy and an act of self-sabotage. Rather than imprisoning the learner, the goal is to integrate the lesson. Poorly presented and badly interpreted evidence creates an unfair trial outcome.

Your past is not your identity. It’s not where you are right now; it’s your former address.

In the same way you wouldn’t keep paying the utility bills for a house or apartment you no longer live in, you need to stop empowering the ghosts of your past in a home you’ve outgrown.

Admit to and own your mistakes.

Learn from your errors so you’re less likely to repeat them.

And then, with the strategic wisdom of an experienced editor, cut the scenes that no longer serve the play or that don’t do anything to move the current plot forward.

The story you’re telling—the one about who you are now and the one about what you’re capable of today—that’s the only story that matters.

Make open. Make it honest. Make it heartfelt and unapologetic, and make it the best story it can possibly be.

It’s not the person you were who’s holding you back, it’s your memory of who that person was at the time. The younger, stupider, dumber, less informed version of you.

So let them go on their way, let them fade into to background as the ghosts they are and forget them.

Do so strategically.

Do so purposefully.

Do so intentionally and without regret. Do so without blame, or shame and without guilt without judgement.

Then start building the current version of yourself in the empty, fertile space they leave behind.

As always, thanks for reading.

—Gary

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Next time on Shaking the Tree: Why your next adventure is a new genre

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Originally from the U.K., Gary Bloomer is a writer, branding advocate, marketing specialist, and an award-winning graphic designer.
His design work has been included in Creative Review (one of the UK’s largest design magazines). Since 2009, he has answered over 5,000 marketing and business questions in the Know-How Exchange of MarketingProfs.com, placing him among the top 3% of contributors. He lives in Wilmington, Delaware, USA.