notes on moving forward

Moving forward is one of those phrases that gets used so often it starts to lose its shape. I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve said to myself “why can’t you just move forward?”. As if forward is a direction I could simply choose, a door to walk through and close behind me.

I spent a long time believing that’s how it had to work. That moving forward meant leaving something behind. That the past was a room I would exit and not return to. That healing was a kind of subtraction - remove the pain, return to the self that existed before all of it, start again from somewhere cleaner.

The first thing I had to learn was to stop leaving myself behind. There is a girl I think of often, the one who spent six years in bed, who felt the world continue without her, who made herself as small as possible in order to survive. She is me, and I am her, and yet for some time I felt like I had to excommunicate that part of me, to leave her chained to that bed to free myself. What a gruesome feeling. What I have started to understand is that moving forward was never about abandoning her, it was about removing what was keeping her tethered, and letting her stand beside me, neither of us stuck anymore.

A friend recently told me she feels like she’s had four different friends in me. It may sound odd from the outside, but it was one of the kindest things that’s been said to me. It helped me realise that all the versions of myself have accumulated, I’ve become more, not less.

I’ve had to learn to love my past instead of trying to cleanly exorcise it from my life.

For a long time, I felt like I was in the waiting room of a good life. I have feared at times that whatever comes next will never compensate for what was lost. In an effort to voraciously attack this fear, I have spent a good part of the past two years “making up for lost time.” It’s been exhausting.
In the middle of a session with my therapist she asked me “What if you stop trying to make up for lost time? What if you just let it be lost?” I felt immediate, gut-wrenching relief. The weight I’ve been carrying around got lighter. The invitation to face forward was freeing.

I started to see that it’s okay to not let my past govern my future.

What I didn’t expect was that letting go of the past as a debt to repay would allow me to see it differently. It wasn’t something to escape, it made me. The years in bed didn’t disappear when I stopped trying to outrun them.

Time (and therapy) healed me like nothing else. I’ve had days of despair, weeks of regression, and then moments of being unable to conceive that life has become this good. Time and change moves both slower and faster than you think it will. Things take shape and then fall apart again.

That’s what moving forward really means, I think. It’s not a single choice to make, not a door to close cleanly behind me. It’s the accumulation of days that I kept going, until I’ve woken up and I can see that I live the life I would dream about from the bed I couldn’t leave.

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Much love,
Lily

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