Lately, I’ve been thinking about revisiting my first book. Not to disown it, and not to correct it in an argumentative way, but to acknowledge how much has shifted. My beliefs have changed, not because I betrayed something true, but because I stayed in relationship with what kept evolving.

At the same time, I’m not the same person I was when I wrote that book. That version of me no longer exists in any lived way. She transformed. And the idea of going back to revise her, to update her language, her beliefs, her certainty, starts to feel strange the longer I sit with it.

We spend a surprising amount of time trying to correct the past. Updating old words. Reframing old relationships. Explaining who we used to be through the lens of who we are now. Somewhere in that effort, we forget to stay with the reality of who we actually are today.

If I did revisit that book, would I even recognize the person who wrote it? And more honestly, should I? The impulse to update my past self begins to feel less like growth and more like a refusal to let time do what time does.

You can’t update who you used to be. Not in a book. Not in a relationship. Not in a belief. No matter how thoughtfully you try to revise it, it no longer belongs to the present version of you. It belonged to a specific moment, a specific consciousness, a specific internal landscape.

Trying to retrofit the past with current understanding starts to feel disorienting. Almost like asking a former self to answer questions she never had the language to ask. That kind of revision edges toward something unhealthy, an insistence that the past should have known what only experience could teach.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if revisiting that book would actually be a betrayal. Not of who I am now, but of who I was then. That book was written honestly, from the depth and clarity available to me at the time. Asking it to be something else now feels like erasing her in favor of me.

And maybe integration doesn’t always mean reconciliation.

Maybe sometimes it means allowing different versions of ourselves to stand on their own merits, without forcing continuity where it no longer exists. The person who wrote that book and the person writing this post are related, but they are not interchangeable.

I don’t think they’re integratable in the way we often imagine integration. Not everything folds neatly forward. Some things are meant to remain where they were formed.

For now, I’m leaning toward letting her stand. Letting the book exist as it was written. Not sabotaging who she was with who I am today. Not asking the past to justify itself to the present.

Moving on doesn’t mean disowning. Sometimes it just means staying where you are, and letting the rest remain where it belongs.

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If this reflection stirred something for you, especially around past versions of yourself, old beliefs, or work you’ve outgrown, you’re welcome to leave a comment. Not to resolve it, but to name what you’re noticing in your own process.

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