I lost myself some time ago, leaving pieces of myself in places and people who didn’t deserve them, having precious bits of me stolen while I was busy locking up muck from everything and everyone around, and never feeling the same again. Immediately after, I started looking to find every part of me I had lost. I looked behind the curtains of my achievements, in the footprints of my failures, under the shadows of my secrets, in the sighs in between spoken words and silences and the gaps between the smiles and tears my memories brought along.
To find a familiar thought, a recognizable feeling- anything. Some parts of me returned, quick as a cat I had owned once and could lure with a treat while others went in hiding, in the pages of some long forgotten chapters of my life perhaps or hearts of people I did not have access to anymore. Maybe the hope was futile- I had lost those pieces like pictures and text messages on an old cellphone which weren’t coming back. But I kept running behind them, hoping to catch up with the person I was, the person who left me to run backwards in time and stick to the past as hard as she could. I ran, as fast as I could and as long as I could, hoping I could catch up, hold her hand and turn her around.
I couldn’t.
Image source: Pixabay, under Creative Commons License
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I simply came to accept that I wasn’t a permanent person. None of us were. And though we might have liked parts of us that existed once upon a time, we changed every moment, in every heartbeat and every breath we took. Every hello we said and every goodbye we waved changed us. Every step we took and every mile we dodged changed us. Every smile we gave and every tear we shed changed us. In changing thus, we became a new version that would turn old the next instant. In changing thus, we lost bits of us that weren’t taking us forward and became equipped with those that would help us with moving on, moving forward.
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In clinging tight to a version of us that best fit in with the image we had of ourselves, the image we liked best, we often ran backwards, like I did, thus, stalling movement forward, stalling growth, stalling the future, in favor of a past we knew well.
But the past has passed for a reason. It cannot keep pace with the present that’s racing toward the future; moving on to things you haven’t experienced yet, but need to. Maybe the past seems familiar, comfortable even, replete with feelings you hold dear, faces you know well, memories you can’t erase and even answers you do not have in the present. But LIFE exists in the “NOW.” And NOW, the feelings you held close once cause you pain, the faces you loved are absent all around and the memories prick, with equal parts joy and grief. The questions have changed too and so, those answers do not fit.
Image source: Pixabay, under Creative Commons License
Then, why do we hanker after what we have lost and keep doing so, preventing ourselves from moving on? Because the void of having lost something essentially US takes time to fill. And running backwards in time to search for it isn’t going to fill the empty space. So no matter how anxious you may feel, lost in the wilderness of a self that you can’t recognize in the mirror, lift that foot and set it forward, followed by the other- you will reach the end of the dark tunnel and pass into the light.
That’s what moving on is all about, anyway.
Featured image source: Pixabay, under Creative Commons License
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