Well, the title comes from what I’m doing (or not doing, as the case may be) and what I’m listening to: my all-time favorite band, Trading Yesterday. They have a new name now, and I think some new members, but I don’t care. I live in the past, in the time when their music was clean and sweet and powerful. They don’t fall into that trap where every song is built around the same six notes or the same chord or whatever; their songs are all unique, all beautiful, though of course I have my favorites. I guess I’m guilty of liking soft, romantic music. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy angrier, louder stuff, especially when I’m running, but when I’m vegetating or procrastinating my tastes run towards country, soft pop (is this a genre? Sounds like a weird kind of candy) classical, and movie soundtracks. Haha – I’m nothing if not predictable.
I’m not sure that I would trade my yesterdays (even the really horrible ones) because I need them. As humans we learn through experience; the world of the theoretical is all well and good, but I can’t build a rocket ship just by reading a blueprint. (If you can, good on you; I’ll make sure they keep your grave tidy and stocked with bouquets.) I need hands-on experience to fully connect with whatever I’m doing; the one exception to this rule is my writing, which isn’t really an exception at all since so much of it comes directly from my personal experience and personal growth. It’s vastly entertaining for me to dump all the things I’ve written onto my floor and arrange them chronologically from middle school to the present. It makes me feel old, true, but accomplished when I see the improvement in my comprehension and articulation of the world. Even if I could, I wouldn’t trade my yesterdays.
I am, however, extremely proficient at trading on my tomorrows. I love to make lists: I have lists of lists junking up my wall, fridge, desk, and planner. Last year I was big into sticky notes; my desk was plastered with them and every time I reached up to pull a book off the shelf ten or so reminders would come fluttering down like pink and yellow leaves. Since then I’ve discovered the desktop equivalent; I’ve had to change the format of my wallpaper so many times to accommodate my sticky notes it’s laughable. I trade my tomorrows away as if they’re infinitely variable and infinitely expansive. This has, occasionally, gotten me into trouble as I overschedule myself and my head explodes. (Metaphorically. I am not Old Faithful.)
I am a worrier (hence the ten thousand sticky notes to ensure I remember everything). I worry and then get mad at myself for worrying. I glorify past events and waste my present (and my potential future) trying to duplicate the good ones and wishing I could go back and re-do the bad ones. This is Bad – yes, with the capital “b.” Even if I’m not willing to trade my yesterdays I still cling to them much too tightly; they creep into my present and keep me from looking ahead. It’s depressing to wake up each morning and have your first thought be “How can I do ____ better than yesterday?” or “How do I fix ____ so that I can get the same result as before?”
Coming out of my depression – jettisoning a little of my anxiety – my senior year of high school helped me at least imagine a future, dispelling the twisted notion that I had no future; something which caused me to be amazed that I was alive to see sixteen, eighteen, first prom, high school graduation. What had all been so vague was now reality. My reality.
Oh help.
I can see the future a little better now; I know it’s there, if nothing else. I fill it up with my wishes and regrets for yesterday, then get angry and tear them all off the wall. But I can think about it now; the future is concrete for me. I know I will finish college. I know I will (hopefully) go to grad school, maybe get my Ph.D. I know I want to get married to a man I love; to have kids by the time I’m thirty; to be a stay-at-home or part-time mom. I know what I want now, and that is, in its own way, a kind of giant sticky note on the wall of my life.
I underestimate and undervalue myself by clutching at my yesterdays and trading my tomorrows. There’s a poem, a famous one, which goes something like this:
If you love something,
Set it free.
If it was meant to be
It will come back to you.
I don’t love my tomorrows or my yesterdays; love is too narrow for how I feel about them. But I do love myself, and what are we as humans – yes, even teacup humans – if not the cumulative wisdom of our yesterdays and the aspirant hopes of our tomorrows? I think I need to set my yesterdays and tomorrows free, to stop clinging to them and pushing them away, and let them settle around me like the rain of colored sticky notes falling from my shelves.
And here, by the way, is the first Trading Yesterday song I ever heard:
Did I bend your brain?
WolfGrrl
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