My friend Jenna said something to me in the spring of 2014 that changed me. She was visiting me in Boston during our senior year of college, and I was laying out my truths for her as we walked through Cambridge: that I hadn’t been okay, that I had relapsed in self-harm, that I felt like the nearly seven years I spent not relapsing meant nothing. I had promised myself never again and I had broken that promise. Spectacularly.
It’s like I wasted all that time, I told her. It was tearing me apart.
No, she told me gently. Seven years is not nothing. Those years mattered. They moved me forward. Just because something didn’t last forever didn’t mean it was not important. It was important.
I’m paraphrasing, but that was the heart of it. That something that happens later doesn’t negate the triumphs and joys of the past.
It didn’t sink in right away when she said it, but over the coming weeks, months, and now years I remember her words so often they feel written on my bones. I reach for them when I lament over any ending: my dead marriage, my changed friendships, the years I spent where life seemed less complicated. Or even a book series, a TV show, an office move, an old belief.
I lean towards racing through life. Though I shouldn’t, I always wanted the supposed prizes. I fell in love young and married young (and divorced young). I have poured myself into career to rise quickly. The idea of kids, even as a single parent, does not feel like a distant future for me.
I binge watch TV and speed through books. I consume and emerge myself in the journeys so deeply that every time I surface I feel lost for my first few breaths. In those moments, I barely know who I am.
I don’t dislike this about myself. I don’t want to be afraid to feel all I can, even if leaves me a bit empty until I’m grounded. Spinning from all the endings, I remind myself what Jenna said: that the journeys mattered.
Today I try to remind myself that there is no ending I’m racing towards in my life. That stories don’t ever really end, just the telling of them. And if they do, it makes each page we read and live more sacred.
Today I try to remind myself that all the completed stories within me are shaping me. That for every ending I mourn there is a beginning in waiting. That life is lived in the middle.
With Love,
Natalie