Yet I have come to believe that while the past is unchangeable, our perceptions of is are malleable...

Everyone has a past, but that's just it--it's in the past. You can learn from it, but you can't change it.

That was the dirty secret associated with her past. Nor that she'd been abused but that somehow she felt that she deserved it because she'd let it happen. Even now, it shamed her, and there were times when she felt hideously ugly, as though the scars that had been left behind were visible to everyone.

because the past was always around her and might return at any time. It prowled the world searching for her, and she knew it was growing angrier at every passing day.

The past was gone and the future had yet to unfold, and he knew he should focus his life on the present…yet his day-to-day existence suddenly struck him as endless and unbearable.

And though she didn’t know it then, whenever her thoughts drifted back toward the past, she would always remember that this was how it all began.

If it’s over, then don’t let the past screw up the rest of your life.

I realize that I don’t know where to start. Not because I’m unsure of my story, but because I’m not sure why I feel compelled to tell it in the first place. What can be achieved by unearthing the past?