Growth Isn’t Erasing the Past — It’s Choosing Who Gets Access Now: STEVEN JENSEN | CHARLOTTE
There’s a moment in life when you realize you’re not forced to stay who you were during your hardest times. Not because it didn’t matter, but because it did its job.
Growth isn’t pretending mistakes didn’t happen. It’s refusing to let them keep a permanent effect on your future. At some point, you must stop explaining who you were and start deciding who gets access to who you are now. That’s when things actually begin to change. Its not easy but the benefits outweigh the fear.
For a long time, I thought growth meant fixing the past; clarifying it, contextualizing it, making sure it was understood by everyone. What I finally learned is that growth has very little to do with explanation and everything to do with direction & action.
You don’t grow by rewriting chapters.
You grow by being open to writing better ones with the right people in your life.
The Shift No One Talks About
There’s a subtle shift that happens when you’ve been through enough: you stop trying to be understood by everyone. Not out of bitterness but out of desire & clarity.
You realize that most people don’t need the full story. Some won’t read it honestly anyway. And some are more invested in their version of you than the real one standing in front of them. What a loss for them. That’s when boundaries stop feeling like walls and start feeling like structure; much needed structure.
When the Past Gets Weaponized
There will always be people who try to control the future by excavating the past. They confuse history with truth and believe that documentation equals definition. It doesn’t. Dragging old chapters into the present says far more about the person doing the digging than the one doing the living. What does that say about the person drudging? Are they unhappy in their own skin and avoiding their own shortcomings and emptiness in life, or just evil in spirit? Growth doesn’t require erasing the record, it requires refusing to let someone else weaponize it for their own self-interest.
Access Is a Privilege, Not a Right
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is this: everyone doesn’t deserve the same level of access to your life, heart, time, energy or your inner world. Growth changes the math and you become more intentional about:
who becomes your ‘person’ to live your life with
who you love
who you open up to
who you listen to
who you explain yourself to
who you allow to influence your decisions
Not because you’re closed off, but because you’re finally open to the right things for the right reasons, now finally at the right time.
Family.
Love.
Work that actually matters.
Those don’t survive on leftovers. They require presence, and presence demands boundaries.
Outgrowing Old Versions of Yourself
There’s nothing wrong with who you were when you were learning. But there is something wrong with staying there out of guilt or loyalty to the past to clean something that doesn’t need cleaning.
Growth means recognizing that some behaviors were survival mechanisms, not permanent identities. Some relationships existed for a season, not a lifetime. Some choices made sense at the time and don’t need to be defended forever. You’re allowed to grow past all of that.
The Quiet Confidence of Moving Forward
The most grounded people I know aren’t loud about their growth. They don’t announce it. They don’t perform it. They just move differently and its attractive.
They protect their bandwidth.
They choose calm over chaos.
They invest where there’s alignment instead of friction.
They understand that peace isn’t passive, it’s disciplined.
Where It All Lands
You’re not defined by your worst chapter. You’re defined by what you build after you learn how to turn the page. This is the hard nut to crack, in your head & heart, but brings great benefit to yourself and those you have chosen to love and live life with – partner, family and kids & friends.
Growth isn’t becoming someone else. It’s becoming more deliberate about who you already are, and who you’re still becoming. And the moment you stop living in reaction to the past is the moment the future finally has room to show up.
— Steven Jensen, Charlotte NC