Chapter 298: How To Let Go: Learning To Deal With Loss[1]
Recently, my wife and I passed by the spot of one of our first dates. For the next few minutes, we smiled and reminisced and rehashed a small happy sliver of our overall shared story. That date had been absolutely magical. One of those nights you dream about when you're an awkward teenager, but as a young adult, you begin to assume it will just never happen.
And then it does. A night that you only get to experience maybe a couple times in your life, if you're lucky.
And with that realization, to my surprise, I began to experience a faint sort of sadness. I grieved over a tiny loss of myself—that cocky, self-assured 27-year-old who walked into that restaurant having no idea what lay before him. The infinite potential that lay before us. The intensity of emotion that I didn't know what to do with.
The two people we were that night were now gone. And they would never come back. I would never get to meet my wife for the first time again. I would never get to fall wildly in love in a way that both excited and terrified me at the same time.1 There was a sweet, cocky ignorance to my younger self that has been irrevocably lost. And despite being lost for the best reasons, it still made me sad. For a few moments, I silently mourned my past the way one mourns a distant relative's death.
And then I moved on.
I'm no stranger to loss. I don't think any of us are. I've watched family members and friends die. I've had romantic relationships end in a spectacular explosion and I've had them end in a long, drawn out silence. I've lost friendships, jobs, cities, and communities. I've lost beliefs—in both myself and others.
Every loss is a form of death. In every case, there once existed an experience—a thing, an idea, a person—that brought your life meaning. And now it no longer exists.
As such, coping with loss always involves the same dynamics. In every case—whether it's the loss of a friendship, a career, a limb, whatever—we are forced to reckon with the fact that we will never experience something or someone again. We are forced to feel an internal emptiness and to accept our pain. We are forced to confront that horrible, horrible word: "Never."
"Never" hurts because never means that it can't be changed. We like to think that things can be changed. It makes us feel better.
"Just work a little bit harder!"
"You just have to want it enough!"
These phrases give us a lil' boot in the ass. They say if you don't like it, get out there and change it.
But "never" means it's over. It's gone. And that's really hard to bear. You can't bring a dead person back to life. You can't restart a broken relationship. You can't fix a wasted youth or redo a past mistake or un-say the words that destroyed a friendship.
When it's gone, it's gone. And it will never be the same, no matter what you do. And this, in a real psychological sense, destroys a small piece of you. A piece that must eventually be rebuilt.
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