How do you move on from something you don’t want to leave behind? Or perhaps the harder question is how do you move on from something you do want to leave behind.
Approaching my mid-twenties I find there are more and more things I have to, or want, to move on from. The student lifestyle is certainly one that I have to move on from, but also that I want to move on from, along with it encompassing all my ‘teenage’ attitude and crazy decision making.
In one sense this is very easy to accomplish. I have moved on – my life has moved on and I am no longer the same person. In another sense this is a lot harder, because moving on involves moving your image on, which while you are entangled with people who are incapable, or reluctant to move on from their image of you, is practically impossible and becomes almost poisonous.
Relationships with people who take this attitude become strained, and eventually downright impossible. You are stuck with a person who constantly sees you as someone else, and this is destructive to who you are trying to become. Your only real choice in this situation is to walk away and find people who accept you for who you are now, and who don’t judge you for who you used to be.
Just as hard, perhaps harder, is moving on from something you don’t want to leave behind. Periods of our lives are comfortable, happy and safe, and we never want to leave those behind even though we might know that we have no choice.
This is something we all have to deal with in life, and perhaps it is the only way we can grow and learn. What is heartbreaking is to have to move on from something in order to learn that what you have moved on from was what you wanted all along. This seems to happen particularly frequently in the case of relationships and it is painful to watch people suffer because they had to leave behind someone they really loved to move on with life, only to find it is too late to go back.
In that situation, all you can do is help someone accept that they have to move on and they have to do the rest of the work themselves. Some people will get a second chance. My fiancée and I were perhaps a exceptional example of right person, wrong time and in our first attempt at a relationship we managed to cause chaos and catastrophe in just about every direction possible. Nine months later, when neither of use were able to move on we tried again, despite the discouragement of just about everyone we knew who thought we had already made quite big enough of a mess without.
Nearly six years later I am more convinced than ever that they were all wrong. The difference was that while people around us weren’t able to move on from the destruction of our first relationship, we both were. We had both changed and the second attempt has done considerably better than the first! We never talk about our respective wrongs and rights of that first relationship, as it is unimportant to us both. What matters is not who we were then, but who we are now. Our relationship today constantly moves on from our respective rights and wrongs. It is always evolving and seems to have found a way to move on with both our lives, an invisible ever-changing entity that binds us together. We are both always able to forget each other’s past-selves and see each other for who we are now.
One of my favourite song quotes:
“Cause I don’t know, who I am, who I am without you, all I know is that I should. I don’t know if I can stand another hand upon you, all I know is that I should.”
You have to know yourself before you can know if you want to spend the rest of your life with someone else. Sometimes that means moving on from a relationship that you don't want to leave behind. Sometimes you get a second chance.
