Making Peace With the Past (Without Making Peace With Injustice)

There’s a phrase people like to throw around when they’re uncomfortable: “Just move on.”

Move on from what, exactly?

From the things that shaped us?

From the wounds that taught our bodies to flinch before our minds could think?

From the decisions—personal and political—that still echo through our lives like an uninvited soundtrack?

No. We don’t “just move on.” That’s not how being human works. That’s not how memory works. That’s not how history works.

But I do think—especially now, especially in this moment—we have to find some way to make peace with the past.

Not to excuse it.

Not to romanticize it.

Not to pretend it wasn’t brutal, unjust, or deeply, deeply stupid in places.

But to stop letting it poison every cell of our present.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: you cannot build a future if you are using all your energy to relitigate the past.

And please hear me clearly: making peace is not the same as making nice.

You do not have to forgive what is unforgivable.

You do not have to reconcile with people who are committed to doing harm.

You do not have to pretend that what happened “was for the best.” Some things were not for the best. Some things were just bad.

Making peace is something else entirely.

Making peace is saying: This happened. It shaped me. And it does not get to own me forever.

Individually, we all have our versions of this. The marriage that should have ended sooner. The job that hollowed us out. The years we spent trying to be palatable instead of powerful. The moments we didn’t speak when we should have. The moments we spoke and paid for it.

And collectively—oh, collectively—we are drowning in unresolved history.

We are a country built on stolen land, stolen labor, and stolen lives, and then we act shocked—shocked!—that the foundation is unstable.

We never finished the work. We paved over it. We rebranded it. We taught a sanitized version of it. And now the bill is due, with interest.

You can feel it everywhere. In the rage. In the fear. In the frantic rewriting of reality. In the way people cling to myths because the truth feels like an existential threat.

But here’s the part nobody likes to talk about: we cannot heal what we refuse to look at. And we cannot move forward while dragging a thousand unexamined ghosts behind us.

Making peace with the past does not mean closing the book.

It means finally reading it honestly.

It means saying: Yes, this is who we were. Yes, this is what we did. Yes, this is what it cost. And then—this is the crucial part—asking: Who do we choose to be now?

On a personal level, this is the work of grief. Grieving the life you thought you’d have. Grieving the version of yourself who didn’t know yet. Grieving the time you can’t get back.

On a national level, it’s the same process, just louder and more politically inconvenient.

And grief, if you’ve ever really done it, is not tidy. It is not linear. It does not care about your schedule.

But ungrieved history doesn’t disappear. It metastasizes.

It shows up as cruelty.

It shows up as denial.

It shows up as nostalgia for eras that were only “great” if you weren’t the one being crushed by them.

One of the great lies of our culture is that looking back is weakness.

Sometimes looking back is the bravest thing you can do.

Because it requires you to give up the fantasy that you were always right. That “we” were always the good guys. That progress is automatic and permanent.

It isn’t.

Progress is a choice we have to keep making. And we cannot make it if we are still emotionally living in arguments from 1965, 1980, 2001, or 2016.

There is a difference between remembering and living there.

Remembering is an act of responsibility.

Living there is a form of captivity.

And here’s the quiet, radical truth: when you finally stop fighting the past, you get your energy back.

Not to forget.

Not to surrender.

But to build.

To build something that does not require constant denial to survive.

To build something that doesn’t depend on someone else being less human for you to feel more secure.

To build something that is sturdier than grievance.

Making peace with the past is not about letting anyone off the hook.

It’s about taking your hands off your own throat.

It’s about saying: I am not going to spend the rest of my life arguing with what cannot be changed. I am going to spend it shaping what still can be.

We are not done. Not as people. Not as a country. Not as a species trying to grow up.

But we will never get there if we keep confusing rage with direction and memory with destiny.

So maybe the work now—the real work—is this:

Tell the truth about the past.

Grieve what it cost.

Learn what it taught.

And then, with clear eyes and steadier hands, choose the future anyway.

That’s not weakness.

That’s freedom.

Julie Bolejack, MBA

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