Even with my self-imposed limited news exposure, the phrase living rent free in someone’s head has appeared more than a few times. In high school, my 20s and 30s, I had so many people living in my head, I was constantly getting new building permits to keep adding to the growing apartment complex up there. To say it was crowded was an understatement. 

What changed? Few things actually. 1) I got older and better at sorting out what mattered and what really didn’t. There were people living up there I was never going to see again; why in the world was I giving them space? Heck, my ability to remember things is iffy at best; I’m going to waste valuable real estate on someone who isn’t even thinking about me. Which leads me to 2) and the quote You’ll stop worrying what others think about you when you realize how seldom they do. –David Foster Wallace. It is true, people rarely think about you to the depth you might worry they do.

And on the other side of the coin, it is a tad amusing to think that you might be living rent free in someone’s head. But I digress. 

Thirdly, people keep dying and I find it sort of stupid to let ghosts take up space full time. I had a lot of baggage in my relationship with my dad for a long time. Some of it was my own, some of it my mother gave me. It was an ugly mis-matched set. He’s been gone a handful of years now and that distance has helped me to weed out what I want to keep of the memory of our relationship.  I now see he did the best he could as a father, and he excelled at being a grandpa.  I do still get caught in the head space of “oh this would disappoint my mom” or stewing about how badly a friendship ended or something my HS biology teacher said. 

When that happens, I try to employ my variation of Hanlon’s Razor (Never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity). If I can get to the point of assuming they were doing the best they could at the time or that they meant something different than it happened, then I am the person who wins.

The people I struggle the most with are those that I know I have behaved badly with or regret something that happened and cannot fix it. I was in 2^nd grade and it was all the rage to take an old glass jar, put masking tape in small pieces all over it and then use brown shoe polish to make a vase. My mom asked me to make one for the woman down the block so we could share some of our flowers. I put it of and the woman died. That woman, who’s name I don’t even remember, lived (ok and pops in occasionally) in my head a long, long time. I can’t fix it. When these happen, the ones I cannot fix. I just think of them and sincerely say I am sorry and hope it finds them. I personally find it makes them spend less time up there.

Because in the end, I need to be the one that decides who is in my head and there are people don’t belong in there. I can pack their bags, show them the door and make room for more good memories.