I have done many things in the past which I am not proud of.

Too many.

On my funeral, there will be people coming, a variety of people.
All of which have known different sides of me, in different stages of life, with different personalities.
Every one of them, will have known a different person, talk about different things, have different perspectives.
A lot of negatives and perhaps some good.

I have a colourful past.

Too colourful.

But I am not ashamed.

People who know me now, the people in my life now.
They will be shocked to know who I was.
In a bad way I guess.

Nevertheless I am not ashamed.

If I were to clean up my closet, bare it all.
Perhaps some would choose to run away from me, not wanting to participate in my life.

But that’s their problem, not mine.

My past had shaped me.
It wasn’t beautiful.
It wasn’t filled with sunshine and flowers.
I could write about it and perhaps can never stop.

But it is history.
And it is mine, my history.
And without a history, I wouldn’t be present.

And I am neither proud nor ashamed of it.
Simply grateful.

Neither am I proud of who I have become.
But I am me. And that’s enough. I would never change that.
Improve perhaps.
But not change. 

No regrets.

“How unfair that life had to end! ...Sophie tried to think extra hard about being alive so as to forget that she would not be alive forever. But it was impossible. As soon as she concentrated on being alive now, the thought of dying also came into her mind. The same thing happened the other way around: only by conjuring up an intense feeling of one day being dead could she appreciate how terribly good it was to be alive. It was like two sides of a coin that she kept turning over and over. And the bigger and clearer one side of the coin became, the bigger and clearer the other side became too. You can’t experience being alive without realizing that you have to die, she thought. But it’s just as impossible to realize you have to die without thinking how incredibly amazing it is to be alive…How tragic that most people had to get ill before they understood what a gift it was to be alive.”.

Taken from Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder.