I'm Not Here to Unlearn.

...the past isn’t dead. she’s sitting beside me.

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There’s a cultural obsession with unlearning.

It shows up in therapy-speak Instagram posts and corporate diversity trainings, in breakup texts that read like journal entries and self-help books that treat lowercase like a personality. Unlearn shame. Unlearn scarcity. Unlearn the voice that only spoke in criticisms. It’s a seductive idea, the notion that we can reverse-engineer our lives, sand down the rough edges, and emerge better. Calmer. More optimized.

But I don’t believe in unlearning.

It’s not that I haven’t made mistakes. Trust me, I’ve made plenty. I’ve said things I couldn’t unsay, loved people I shouldn’t have touched, trusted advice that dragged me in the wrong direction. I’ve inherited ways of thinking I wish I hadn’t. Internalized things I never meant to absorb. I’ve replayed moments on a loop, wondering who was driving.

But even in the wreckage, I’ve never been able to convince myself that the answer is to erase. Or to edit. Or to peel back layers until I find the “real” me, unsullied and fresh.

She doesn’t exist.

Never did.

We are, all of us, made of sediment—layers of decisions, teachings, misfires, instincts, gut reactions that turned out to be indigestion. And even when we try to rewrite the narrative, the truth still shows up in the margins.

This isn’t cynicism. It’s a kind of respect. For the self that survived. For the version of me that didn’t know better… but still moved forward.

I think about this every time someone tells me they’re “unlearning.” I want to ask: what happens to the part of you that learned it in the first place? Where do they go? Are they someone you leave behind, or someone you sit down with? Do you forgive them, or do you shame them into exile?

The idea of unlearning feels too much like pretending. It assumes a clean break between who we were and who we are now. It flatters us with the illusion of control. But identity doesn’t work that way. Neither does healing.

We tell ourselves the ‘look how far I’ve come’ story. It posts well, of course. But mostly, it wraps chaos in narrative and pins meaning to moments that, at the time, were just survival.

But growth isn’t always tidy. It isn’t always traceable. Sometimes it looks like progress; sometimes it looks like slipping back into habits you swore you were done with. Sometimes it looks like sitting on your bathroom floor at 2 a.m., texting someone you deleted from your contacts and renamed “Don’t.”

And no one likes to admit that part.

We prefer the digestible arc—healing as a checklist, clarity as a deliverable. But that’s not how memory works. That’s not how change works. You can’t curate your life into coherence. You live it in overlapping drafts: the version you were taught, the version you performed, the version you’re still trying to believe.

I think about this when I see people being canceled. Not held accountable, that’s different, but discarded. There’s a cultural hunger for exile, like the worst thing someone can be is wrong in public. We treat people like brand identities, one mistake away from a recall, as if they should come with a satisfaction guarantee. Say the wrong thing, believe the wrong thing, learn too slowly, and suddenly you’re beyond redemption. But growth doesn’t happen in exile. It happens in contact—messy, uncomfortable, human contact. If we only offer grace to the version of someone who’s already made it through the fire, we’re not encouraging change. We’re demanding illusion. And when we start confusing accountability with erasure, what we’re building isn’t justice or community… it’s curated morality. A performance of goodness so spotless it forgets how messy becoming is.

There’s no clean version of me. There shouldn’t be. I don’t need to be distilled down to my best takes and wisest edits. That isn’t growth. That’s branding.

And if there’s one thing I’ve stopped aspiring to be, it’s marketable—that sellable kind of self that promises you can get somewhere clean. Somewhere pure.

But I don’t want to be pure. I want to be whole.

And wholeness, if we’re being honest, includes contradiction.

I was raised on ideas I don’t agree with anymore. I have instincts I work to resist. I’ve had to teach myself not to shrink, not to apologize too quickly, not to carry everyone’s feelings like a purse with too many receipts. And yet, I learned all that for a reason. Those were survival skills. That past version of me? She was doing the best she could with the map she was handed.

I don’t want to punish her for that.

So no, I don’t want to unlearn. I want to integrate. To look at the mistake and the muscle it built. To name the pain and still thank the teacher. Even when the teacher was wrong. Especially when the teacher was wrong.

There’s a certain arrogance to the idea that we can outgrow ourselves so completely that the past becomes irrelevant. It’s not irrelevant. It’s baked in. And if we’re lucky, if we’re brave, we keep changing. But change isn’t about cutting things out. It’s about making room.

Sometimes I think we confuse healing with amnesia. Like the goal is to forget what hurt us, or worse, who we were when it did. But memory doesn’t work like that. Neither does change. You can stitch the wound. Clean it up with better boundaries. But the scar still knows the story. And pretending otherwise doesn’t make you stronger. It just makes you dishonest. Healing isn’t about erasing the version of you that made the mess. It’s about letting that version of you sit beside the one who’s trying to clean it up.

I want to remember. I want the full thing. The heartbreak, the fuck-ups, the misguided beliefs I carried like heirlooms. The version of me who thought love meant losing yourself. The version who let herself be explained away. The version who believed what they told her about being too sensitive.

She deserves more than erasure. She deserves a voice.

When people say they’re unlearning, what they often mean is they’re moving on. They’re course-correcting. That’s good. Necessary even. But let’s not pretend we’re shedding skins like snakes. We’re not snakes. We’re humans. Complicated, inconsistent, sometimes embarrassing humans. And the more we own that, the more honest we get to be—with each other and ourselves.

So I won’t unlearn. I’ll remember. I’ll carry it.

Some lessons just bruise better with time.

File Under: I Don’t Want to Be Marketable

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The Ash Files—Where life’s unexpected moments get filed away—sometimes neatly, sometimes under “figure it out later.” From writer/creator ASH, expect weekly musings, honest stories, and a reminder that no one has life entirely figured out [least of all me].✨

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