It Wasn’t Me… But It Was Me

There’s a particular kind of regret that doesn’t resolve cleanly. It’s that when you look back, the version of you who did it doesn’t feel fully familiar. Something about that period, your mood, your reactions, your intensity, enough that now, sitting here, you find yourself thinking:

That’s not who I am.

And then almost immediately:

But I still did it.

That tension is where people get stuck. If it were clearly “you,” then at least the story would make sense. Painful, but coherent. You would take responsibility, feel the weight of it, and over time, integrate it into your understanding of yourself. If it were clearly “not you,” then maybe you could dismiss it. Blame the circumstances, the stress, the medication, the hormones, the lack of sleep, something external that explains it cleanly enough to let you move on.

But most people don’t get either of those clean versions, they get something in between.

A version of themselves that felt real in the moment, but foreign in hindsight. A set of actions that had real consequences, but don’t line up with how they normally experience themselves. And now they’re left trying to answer a question that doesn’t have a satisfying answer:

How much of that was actually me?

This question sounds important, but it’s often the thing keeping you stuck, because it assumes that if you can just figure out the right percentage, how much was you, how much was the situation, how much was biology, then everything will settle. Either you’ll forgive yourself or you’ll condemn yourself, but at least you’ll land somewhere solid.

In reality, it doesn’t work that way. The mind wants a clean category: me or not me. But human behavior, especially during periods of internal disruption, doesn’t organize itself that neatly. You can be influenced by something, stress, medication changes, hormonal shifts, emotional overwhelm, and still be the one who acted. You can feel unlike yourself and still be responsible for what you did.

That’s the part people resist, and also the part that actually frees them.

Because as long as you’re trying to prove it wasn’t you, you stay stuck in a kind of defensive loop. You keep revisiting the past, trying to gather evidence, trying to reduce your responsibility just enough that you can breathe again. But it never quite works. There’s always something that pulls you back into doubt.

On the other side, if you collapse completely into it was me and that means this is who I am, you end up in a different kind of trap. One where every action becomes a reflection of a fixed identity, and the only logical conclusion is self-condemnation. Neither position is livable.

The work is in tolerating the more uncomfortable truth:

Something shifted in you, and your behavior shifted with it.
You are not reducible to that moment.
And you are still responsible for what happened within it.

That’s not a clean answer. But it’s a workable one and from there, the focus changes. Instead of trying to solve the past perfectly, you begin to understand it more clearly. What was happening internally during that time? What patterns were present? What vulnerabilities were in play? Not in a way that excuses anything, but in a way that makes the experience less mysterious and less all-defining.

Then comes the harder part: deciding what responsibility actually looks like.

Not the exaggerated version driven by shame, where you feel like you have to carry everything forever. And not the minimized version that avoids discomfort. Something more precise. What impact did your actions have? What, if anything, can be repaired? What cannot be repaired, and has to be accepted?

These are not easy questions. But they are grounded in reality, which is where movement starts to happen.Over time, something else begins to shift. The memory doesn’t disappear, but it becomes less overwhelming. It stops being the single lens through which you see yourself. It becomes part of your history rather than the definition of your identity. And from there, a different question emerges:

Given that this happened, who do I want to be now?

Not who you were before. Not who you wish you had been in that moment. But who you are willing to be moving forward, with full awareness of what you’re capable of under certain conditions.

That’s where real stability comes from, not from proving that the past “wasn’t you,” but from building a version of yourself that can hold the truth of it without collapsing. If you’re in that space right now, caught between that wasn’t me and but it was, you’re not alone in it. And more importantly, you’re not stuck there permanently.

You don’t need a perfect explanation to move forward. You don’t need to erase what happened to rebuild yourself. You just need a way to hold both sides of the truth without letting either one define you completely.