Usually having history with someone correlates to having had some sort of past relationship with them. Sometimes it means good things, sometimes bad. It could’ve been romantic, platonic or familial. When you look back on it, you either smile or cringe. The combinations are infinite. But no matter the “who” or “why”, it’s in the past. You got history. So what?

Having history, no matter the circumstances, is always a privilege. It's proof of a life actually lived, rather than a life where you just sat on the sidelines of your own story. It's proof that you were there, somewhere, and made waves. It may sound a bit egotistic, liking that you had an effect on someone else in some way, but what's the point of life if it’s not about the human connection?

All our adult lives we are trying to “succeed” by getting the right job, making money, and having the perfect family. But when we were little kids, wasn’t the greatest success making a friend on the playground? How did our ideas of success alter so drastically? We forgot one thing.

All the good things we have in our life right now, are in some aspect, things we have because of other people.

I don’t mean that you haven’t worked hard. (You have. I have. We are hard workers. End of story.) What I mean is that you’ve become the person you are today because of your experiences… because of your history. You’ve become you because of certain people, in spite of certain people, and despite certain people.

It’s like when you see a part of yourself in your best friend’s actions. Or how you notice you’ve picked up many of your own mannerisms from your family. It’s a push and pull of influencing and being influenced until we’ve all molded each other. It’s history. Our shared history.

For many, such as myself, having history can be a great lesson (coincidentally, it’s usually a hard one). We’ve all been hurt by someone before – I’m pretty sure there’s a million songs written about just that. And we’ve had to learn from those hurts. I’ll be frank here. It sucks. But because we’ve had history with these hurtful people, we now know how to see their ilk coming from a mile off and avoid them.

Other lessons are not so hard. Having a good history with people makes us hopeful and keeps us open-minded. We’ve experienced what’s it’s like to be in a healthy, mutually loving relationship and it has made us better people. That’s the type of history we all love having. It’s also the type of history we try to keep in the present and hopefully in our future. But even if it’s completely in the past, we get to smile about it and remember it with fondness.

Then there’s the last lesson. The hardest. When you have mostly fantastic history with someone, but it ended on a horrible note which mars the whole story. You can still smile over the memories, but they’re always tinged with sadness, regret, or pain. Yeah, those are the worst.

But it’s just another part of your history. It’s just another wonderful human connection you’ve had the privilege of forging. And no matter what your history is, you’re still here writing your story, hard lessons and all.

And maybe one day, someone will read that story and be inspired to keep writing theirs. So have history. After all, it'll be in the past one day. So you might as well go for it now.