“The secret is, if what we need and want is missing, we begin by going back to where we last saw it.”
– Anne Lamott

I saw this quote by Anne today and thought, “Wow- that is a pretty interesting insight.”

I spend so much of my mental life looking back, and a lot of that looking back centers around my high school years.

I suppose, to some extent, that is normal. High school years are so rife with new experiences, and change, and moments of personal transformation.

For some people, those years are so full of pain and discomfort, though, that they cannot revisit them. Those are years they want to forget.

Those years for me were a mix of heartaches and happiness, as they were for many of us. You were discovering life, and deeper friendships, and social pressure, and the need to perform, and the meaning of being responsible. And how to interact and get along with people who were not family members.

But I think for me, there is some truth in what Anne said above, about why I go back there so often mentally.

In many ways, I think I was my best self back then.

I’ve talked a few times with Bonnie about this, and inevitably Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development come up. And I am reminded of how powerful and important his model is for understanding stages of our inner lives.

We each go through stages in life, major phases that every person deals with- phases that leave each one of us with decisions about how we will mature. And the big internal conclusion we come to in one stage impacts how far we can grow in the next.

And people get stuck in a stage when they cannot surmount the challenges within it, and in many ways, remain there psychosocially until issues are dealt with, and progress occurs.

Lamott’s assertion has additional wisdom to consider when pondered in reverse: when we regularly go back to a certain place, we are looking for something that was lost at or after that place in time.

And then the question becomes: What are you looking for?

Some people raise kids. Some people raise concerns. Some people raise roofs. Some people raise ghosts.