Acceptance

I’ve been rereading The Great Gatsby again and I feel like I’m finally understanding it. At this point in my life, I’ve taken a lot more lessons from the short novel than the last time I tried to finish it. It is more an essay on trying to run from the past and being unable to reconcile how it doesn’t define us but it does build us into the people we really are. Gatsby can’t acknowledge his past because he wants to try to build around the facade of high society. He can’t acknowledge who he really is without letting the past define him.

In the last few months, I’ve had intense writer’s block. Nothing I write seems worthy of my expectations—it revolves around my time abroad again or it’s too sad. Quite frankly, I’m almost sick of trying to relive my memories from Germany. I feel like a one-trick pony who is only capable of telling moments that, at this point, happened five years ago. Half a decade of living in the past. 

I let memories from the times I really lived distract me from life I experience now. 

In the past, I would wake up suddenly, sweating—feeling as though I were back in some moment abroad that made an impact on me. A song would come on the station that reminded me of someone or something and I would have to turn it off as it was too painful to hear, knowing that I was currently in an unhappy, unfulfilling life when I knew what I was capable of feeling and experiencing. How can I calmly live a life of disappointment after two years of intense, piquant adventures. 

Not every moment was happy. In fact, looking back at my old blogs I wrote in Germany, they seem downright depressing as hell too. That is a case of wherever you go, there you are and I can reconcile that. But I did feel sad in a place that made me happy, and I knew the sadness wouldn’t last. Every day felt like a new start there, I could step outside and choose to be in another country if I wanted. The friendships and relationships are magnified, intense and venerable. I had and have never made friends like I did there. The food was holistically flawless and delicious. The locals were friendly and caring. The sun was bright and happy. In short, life there was memorable, every single day of it. It was the hardest I ever lived and I wouldn’t trade a day of it. 

But I write this blog not as another love letter to that life; I write it as a goodbye. 

The only way for me to truly move forward in my personal and professional endeavors is to finally let go of those memories that hold me captive. I hold to my heart only ghosts of what once was. Those eternal moments that I was able to live and relive, dissect and repair have become bastardized versions of the actual truth. I didn’t feel this way toward those moments when I lived them; rather, I took them for granted.

After five years, I realize that I have forgotten a great deal more than I thought. People that I once held close to my heart now barely register as strangers, places that I swore to remember silently flee from my memory. 

For the longest time, I thought our past defined us. Memories were the real me and that, if I let them go, I would no longer be as cool or interesting or unique as I wanted to be. However, I’ve been facing the reckoning: the past is what makes us but it doesn’t define us. 

That probably seems obvious to most people. Nonetheless, it is a lesson I’ve learned the hard way after twenty-seven years. I would go through something traumatic or impassioned and tuck the memory away as a defining moment for myself, reliving it whenever I had the chance to experience those feelings again and remind myself that that moment was who I am really. 

Since returning from Europe, taking stock of my life, I’ve really done nothing important. Crippled with indecision, lack of purpose and conflicting motives, I have been content to revert back to the past. Memories are firm and decisive, at first glance, and it’s easy to cling to something firm in the midst of confusion. However, the memories I was reliving back in March 2023 are not the same as today. Today, they seem mistier, airier, esoteric. I don’t get the same, all-encompassing feeling when I reach back out to them. I have probably distorted the memory to fit my purposes now and how it happened is actually vastly different. I am escaping to a snow bridge, seemingly firm ground covering a large, gaping chasm. 

It leads me to realize I must stop relying on these memories to get me through hard times. In reality, they are perpetuating my hard times. I must stop living in the past if I want to concentrate on the future for once. 

I have finally hit a point in my life where I need to shit or get off the pot. Reality has slowly been catching up with me and now it’s arrived full force and, for the first time, I actually feel ready to face it. I have dreams and ambitions that I want to accomplish and I can’t do that if I’m constantly paralyzed with old memories of a man who doesn’t reflect the current version standing in front of the mirror. 

I write this in the hopes that it might help someone else going through the same thing. Whether trauma holds you back or even happy memories that you love to comb through day after day, you have to acknowledge that the only way forward is to accept them. Know that the past is the past and what happened is what really happened, but until you are ready to get real with the story, you will be stuck in a loop.

 Accept who you are and how the moment affected you and understand you can’t move on without processing both. You are who you are and your past is your past. Once those two have been made into one, you can continue living presently and passionately. 

I am going to finally move past what holds me back. I accept that those memories shaped me but they don’t define me. If I want the chance to be present, I have to finally accept that I am interesting and engaging as a human already, I don’t have to dwell on certain moments. 

It feels as though a lot of possibilities are around the corner for me now that I’ve finally started to get serious about life and I’m excited. I don’t have the time to live in the past anymore—I am working on making my future as fun as possible. I hope I can get there.