Why The Past Keeps Following Us
Originally published in Deccan Herald on 31 July '26
What is the ego, actually? Not arrogance, and not pride either, despite how loosely the word gets thrown at people who are merely confident; it is simply the sense of ‘I am’, and whatever you privately attach to that sentence - achiever, failure, the person who was wronged - becomes the material the ego runs on. Memory turns out to be one of its favourite supplies.
Memory itself is neutral and mechanical, the same function that lets you recall a phone number or the way home without any preference for one over the other. Left alone, it would let most things fade, including the old slight that still bothers you for no reason you can name.
The ego is what keeps the slight alive, picking through that storage and pulling out exactly what serves its story while leaving the rest to fade on its own. Two or three wounds, revisited often enough, end up bigger in your head than they ever were on the actual day.
This happened to me; therefore, I am this: that’s the formula, run on every grudge the ego hasn’t let go of. Take away the inherited grievances and the tally of who owes you what, and there’s less of you left than you’d like to admit.
It isn’t only the past that gets treated this way. A future self gets the identical treatment, except hope stands in for memory. That self hasn’t arrived yet and probably won’t arrive exactly as imagined, but looking forward does roughly the same job as looking back, something for the ego to hold onto besides whatever is happening right now. Call the whole arrangement time, if you like.
It is mostly just this: memory pulling one way, hope pulling the other, with very little left over for the present.
None of this gets solved by deciding to let go, which is usually just the ego writing itself a new story, the one where it gets to play the part of someone who finally moved on.
What actually happens, more often than people expect, is that tonight’s grudge didn’t arrive because it was that strong. The ego needed something familiar to hold, the way it always does, and a decade-old slight happened to be sitting right there.
Originally published in Deccan Herald on 31 July '26
