The Place Was Never the Problem: Learning Not to Let the Past Define the Present.

\

For a long time, I used to say that I hated Newcastle. I said it quite easily and, at the time, I genuinely believed it. I moved away in my early twenties purely because of work. It was a career move and that was the reason I left, but at the same time I was happy to be going because of some of the things I was leaving behind. There had been family fallouts and difficult situations going on around that period of my life, and although they were not the reason I moved away, they certainly meant I did not feel any great sadness about leaving.

Over time, those two things became mixed together in my mind. Newcastle stopped being simply the city I had grown up in and became connected with the family difficulties, arguments and hurt that had been happening when I left. Without really noticing it, I began to associate the place itself with how I had felt at the time. The city became a sort of shorthand for everything I wanted distance from. So when I thought about Newcastle, I was not really thinking about the city at all. I was thinking about what my life had felt like when I lived there.

I remember talking to a friend about it once and saying that I hated Newcastle. They gently pointed out something that, looking back, seems incredibly obvious: it was not Newcastle I hated, it was the situation I had left behind. Newcastle had simply been where it happened. That comment stayed with me because I realised how much I had allowed the circumstances of one period of my life to colour the way I felt about an entire place.

That is really the crux of it for me. We often connect emotions to things that were not actually responsible for causing them. A place, a song, a smell, a particular time of year or even a journey can become tied to whatever was happening in our lives at the time. Those associations can be positive, but they can also mean that something difficult ends up taking ownership of far more than it deserves. That is exactly what I had allowed to happen with Newcastle.

The strange thing is that, because I had labelled the whole place as somewhere I hated, I had also pushed aside all the good memories that belonged there. There were plenty of them. There had been fun, friends, nights out, laughter, familiar streets, places I liked and moments that had nothing whatsoever to do with the difficult things happening in the background. But the bad memories had become louder, so they seemed to speak for the whole place.

I think we do this much more often than we realise. We attach memories and emotions to places, people, songs, smells, times of year and all sorts of things that were simply there when something happened. Sometimes that is lovely. A song comes on and immediately takes us back to a holiday, a night out, somebody we loved or a particular moment we had forgotten about. The smell of certain food can remind us of childhood. We can visit somewhere and instantly feel calmer because of the memories we have made there.

But it works the other way too. A place can become associated with an argument. A certain time of year can remind us of a loss. A road, a restaurant, a town or even a particular type of weather can bring back feelings that have very little to do with what is actually happening now. The memory becomes so connected to the thing around it that we stop seeing the difference.

That was what had happened to me with Newcastle. When I thought about the city, I was not really thinking about Newcastle itself. I was remembering how I felt during a particular period of my life. I was remembering the family difficulties, the fact that I had been happy to leave them behind, and probably the person I was at the time. I was looking at Newcastle through the eyes of somebody in his early twenties whose life was moving on and who was quite relieved to have some distance from what had been happening around him.

It made me think about how often we do the same thing with days as well. There is a saying I really like: we do not have a bad day, we have a bad moment and then indulge in it. I do not take that literally, because some days really are awful and some periods of life are genuinely difficult from beginning to end, but I understand the point behind it.

Something happens at nine in the morning and we are annoyed, upset or frustrated.

Perhaps somebody says something that gets under our skin, an email arrives that we do not want, we have an argument, something goes wrong, or we make a mistake. Then six hours later someone asks how our day has been and we say, “Terrible.” But often the whole day was not terrible. One part of it was.

There may have been a nice cup of coffee, a good conversation, something that made us laugh, a walk, a meal we enjoyed, a job we finished, or simply a moment when we felt content. Yet one bad moment gets promoted to become the story of the entire day.

I think I did exactly that with Newcastle, just on a much bigger scale. I had taken a difficult period and allowed it to become the story of an entire place. It is easy to do because bad memories can be powerful. They have a way of elbowing out quieter ones. We remember the argument more clearly than the nice meal before it. We remember the difficult ending of a relationship and forget that there were years when we were genuinely happy. We remember the stressful incident on a holiday and say the whole holiday was awful. We remember the difficult job and forget the people we met there, the things we achieved and the days when we actually enjoyed it.

Once we start telling ourselves that something was bad, the story can become more and more absolute over time. That is where I think we can lose something important. We can accidentally allow the difficult part of a memory to swallow up everything else that was there at the same time.

The problem with that is that we can lose the good along with the bad. We can allow an unhappy memory to take things from us that did not belong to it in the first place. A relationship ends badly, so we stop going to a place we loved because we used to go there together. Something painful happens at Christmas and suddenly Christmas itself feels tainted. A song becomes linked to someone and we cannot listen to it anymore. A whole city can become something we avoid because it reminds us of what happened there.

We give the difficult experience ownership over much more of our lives than it deserves.

What changed for me was not that I forgot what had happened or decided that those family issues did not matter. They did matter. Some memories remain difficult, and pretending otherwise would not achieve anything. What changed was that I stopped allowing them to own Newcastle.

I began to understand that two things could be true at the same time. I could have difficult memories connected with Newcastle and still like Newcastle. There could have been a painful period in my life and good things could still have happened during it. The bad did not need to erase the good. I did not need to rewrite my own history into one simple version where everything connected with that time was miserable.

I think this is particularly important when we are thinking about our mental health, because difficult periods can distort the way we remember things. If life is stressful, unhappy or complicated for a while, it is very easy to look back later and describe that whole period as terrible. But when we really think about it, there were probably moments of happiness within it. There were probably days when we laughed, enjoyed ourselves or simply forgot about the problems for a few hours.

Those moments still count.

I think sometimes we almost feel as though we are not allowed to enjoy ourselves when something difficult is happening. If we are worried about somebody, struggling at work, dealing with family problems or simply going through a difficult period, it can feel strange to laugh or enjoy a day out. There can even be a sense of guilt attached to it, as though enjoying ourselves somehow means the problem is not serious.

But I do not think life works like that.

We are capable of carrying more than one feeling at the same time. We can be worried and still laugh. We can be sad and enjoy a meal. We can be dealing with something extremely difficult and still notice a beautiful view. We can be anxious about tomorrow and still enjoy today.

Those good moments do not make the difficult ones any less real. They simply remind us that the difficult thing is not the whole of our lives.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me. If we wait until everything in life is sorted before allowing ourselves to be happy, we could be waiting forever. There is nearly always something going on. Work pressures, family issues, worries about money, health, relationships, responsibilities, things we are waiting for and things we cannot control. There is rarely a point where every part of life lines up perfectly and gives us permission to relax.

If happiness requires everything else to be right first, then happiness becomes something we are always postponing.

Sometimes we have to enjoy the good while the difficult things are still there.

That is why I like the idea that a bad moment does not have to become a bad day. It is not about denying what happened or forcing ourselves to be cheerful. It is about trying not to give one difficult thing more of our time than it deserves. Something can go wrong in the morning and still leave room for something good in the afternoon. An argument does not automatically have to ruin the evening. A disappointment does not have to cancel everything else.

I still do it, of course. Everyone does. Something annoys me and I can replay it in my head long after the actual moment has passed. A conversation can stay with me for hours. A frustration can follow me around when the thing itself is already over. But I try to catch myself doing it now.

Sometimes I ask myself whether the whole day is actually bad, or whether I am simply carrying one bad moment through the rest of it.

Quite often, it is the latter.

That was effectively what I had done with Newcastle. I had carried one part of my life forward and allowed it to shape the way I felt about the whole city for years afterwards.

Over time, I started to see Newcastle differently. I could go back without feeling that the past was waiting for me around every corner. I could look at the city for what it actually was rather than what I had made it represent. I started noticing the things I liked about it again. The familiarity of it, the humour, the buildings, the river, the bridges and that unmistakable feeling of being somewhere that had been part of my life for a long time.

I realised that Newcastle had not really changed. I had.

More importantly, my relationship with it had changed.

I had stopped seeing it entirely through the memories of one difficult period. I could appreciate it as the great city it is, while still acknowledging everything that had happened there. The two things no longer had to compete with each other.

The Scottish Borders have become particularly special to me for much the same reason. They are now somewhere I feel incredibly safe and happy. There is something about being there that settles me. It has become one of those places where I can relax almost as soon as I arrive. I feel comfortable there in a way that is difficult to explain unless you have somewhere that does the same thing for you.

There are memories connected with the Borders too, of course. Some good and some less so, because that is life. But I no longer allow the difficult ones to taint the whole place. They do not get to decide what the Borders mean to me now.

The good memories are allowed to stand on their own.

The happiness is allowed to be real.

That, for me, is a huge change.

There is something very freeing about realising that the emotional meaning of a place is not fixed forever. We can go back. We can make new memories. We can experience somewhere as the person we are today rather than the person we were twenty or thirty years ago.

We cannot change the past, but we can stop allowing it to claim things that do not belong to it.

That principle applies to far more than Newcastle or the Scottish Borders. There may be a place we think we dislike because of something that happened there. There may be a song we avoid because of who it reminds us of. There may be a holiday we remember as awful when in reality one or two events overshadowed everything else. There may even be entire periods of our lives that we have mentally filed away as bad, when in truth they contained plenty of happiness as well.

Sometimes it is worth looking again.

Was the whole thing really bad?

Or was something bad happening alongside other things that were actually quite good?

That does not mean rewriting history or pretending that painful experiences were not painful. I think that would be just as unhelpful. There are things in life that deserve to be called difficult, upsetting or unfair. Sometimes people do things that hurt us. Sometimes circumstances are genuinely awful.

Improving our mental health is not about pretending everything is wonderful.

For me, it is more about trying to see things in proportion.

A bad moment is a bad moment.

A difficult person is a difficult person.

An argument is an argument.

A painful memory is a painful memory.

They do not automatically have to become the whole day, the whole year or the whole place.

I also think we have to be careful about the words we use in our own heads. We very quickly move towards absolutes. Everything is going wrong. Nobody understands. Nothing ever works out. This always happens. I hate that place.

Those words feel true when emotions are high, but they are often much broader than reality.

Everything?

Nothing?

Always?

The entire day?

The whole city?

Sometimes simply questioning those words can create a little bit of distance from what we are feeling.

And that distance can be useful.

For me, Newcastle is probably the best example of that. For years I said I hated it. Once I looked more closely, I realised that was never really true. What I hated were some of the situations and memories connected to the time when I lived there. The city itself had done nothing wrong.

Once I separated the two, I got Newcastle back.

I could appreciate it again. I could enjoy going there. I could remember the good parts as well as the bad. I could recognise that my early twenties were not one single unhappy story simply because difficult family things were happening at the same time.

The fun I had was still fun.

The laughter still counted.

The good memories were still good memories.

And the same is true now when life is difficult. We do not have to wait for every problem to disappear before we allow ourselves to enjoy something. Sometimes an hour of happiness in the middle of a difficult week is exactly what we need.

We do not have to deny the bad.

We just do not have to let it consume everything around it.

Today, I love Newcastle again. I can see it for what it is rather than what I once associated it with. And the Scottish Borders have become one of my special places, somewhere I feel genuinely happy, comfortable and safe.

The past has not disappeared. The memories have not been erased.

They just no longer get to decide how I feel about those places.

Perhaps that is one of the most useful lessons I have learned about looking after my own mental health. We cannot always change what happens to us, and we cannot choose which memories remain, but we can sometimes change how much space we allow those memories to occupy.

We can stop one bad moment becoming a bad day.

We can stop one difficult period becoming a bad year.

And sometimes we can stop painful memories taking away a place that, underneath everything else, we actually love.