09/19/2026
I got arrested here.
Yep. This exact 7-Eleven. 😂
Not exactly the opening line you expect from your friendly neighborhood Transformational Life Coach, is it?
But standing here again all these years later got me thinking about something.
We hear a lot about not looking backward.
You can’t change the past.
Leave it behind.
Focus on where you’re going.
And I understand the sentiment.
But I don’t completely agree.
Because sometimes looking backward isn’t about going backward.
Sometimes we need to look back to collect the evidence of how far we’ve come.
Teenage me was arrested at this 7-Eleven for curfew and minor in possession.
She made choices I’m certainly not recommending. 😂
But she was also living a life I understand very differently now than I did then.
And standing in this parking lot decades later, I didn’t feel shame toward her.
I felt compassion.
Because her choices were part of her story.
They weren’t the end of it.
That’s something life has taught me over and over again:
A chapter can explain you without defining you.
Maybe that’s one reason I don’t believe healing requires us to erase our past.
Sometimes we need enough distance from it that we can finally turn around and see it differently.
Not to climb back inside it.
Just long enough to say…
Damn. Look how far I’ve come.
I’m curious:
If you could stand somewhere from an earlier chapter of your life today, what evidence of change would you see?