August Left

And just like that, another round of days off come to an end. I work the next three days covering the weekend. Two afternoon shifts and an overnight so it shouldn’t be too bad. And I got paid today so that felt amazing. Things are finally turning around.

I visited a friend yesterday. We were supposed to go hiking but due to me feeling under the weather I had to cancel the outing. So instead I spent the afternoon sitting and chatting with her while we shared some porridge at her apartment.

We talked about our lives and the challenges we’re facing trying to figure out our paths forward. She talked about how she has been trying really hard to make sense of everything in her life now. About how she looks back on what her life looked like before her divorce and how she felt she was a much more confident person.

I told her the way I see it, there isn’t a separate identity in her past of who she was vs. who she is now. Life isn’t split up that way. The person she is now is who she is because of what she has experienced in life. She was grieving a version of herself she felt was gone, and that to feel happy she needed to become that again. I told her that everything she wants to be is inside her already.

It made me reflect on a conversation I had with my ex during our breakup. My ex didn’t want to cut off her past relationships because she was scared of losing the part of herself that she associated with those people. And somehow she was trying to justify that keeping them around was more important than leaving them behind. At the time, I experienced her need to preserve those connections as being in conflict with what I needed to feel secure in our relationship.

It was interesting to me to hear that my friend also felt like there was a version of herself she had to protect. That moving forward was somehow abandoning that memory of herself.

Of course I have also gone through a lot of processing the past. I’ve been writing in this blog for almost a year now and most of it is reflection on what has happened during and after the fallout of my last relationship.

There is a quote by Walt Whitman – “Keep your face always toward the sunshine and shadows will fall behind you”. That has resonated with me pretty hard especially over the last couple months. All I’ve been doing is trying to keep my face towards the sun. Cutting off communication with my ex, leaving the job we shared together, taking a job that was going to make me more money, starting over.

It was never to chase a version of myself that I felt like I needed to become again. But to get the person I am now back to a place where I didn’t feel trapped anymore. And now moving forward with all the wisdom, pain, grief, new friendships, and experiences that allows the current me to let the shadows fall behind me.

Especially turning 30 this year, and my friend feeling it even more being older than me, I think there is a societal/cultural pressure to adhere to a timeline of how your life should go. And honestly I felt like I was on that timeline when I moved here with my ex. We had the talks about marriage, house, kids. Colorado was supposed to be home and the pieces were falling into place.

But things change, and that’s okay. All you can do is take it one day at a time and forgive yourself when you stumble. Just get up again and keep yourself moving forward.

Thanks for reading.