At some point during your journey of life, mourning the loss of a life once known is probably something you will have to go through if you haven’t already.
There are several transitions we go through in life. From being a student to being an employee. From being a child to being a parent. From being single to being married.
Maybe being a husband or wife is more challenging than you thought it would be. Maybe the new job you got isn’t all that you thought it would crack up to be. Maybe you just miss the fun you had in college, the people you were constantly surrounded by.
In life, it’s easy to reflect back on a life once known to you, once familiar.
It’s easy to feel like you’ve lost yourself.
It’s easy to want your old life back.
If you find yourself mourning the loss of a life you once knew, here’s how to graciously let yourself move forward.
Give Your Past the Credit It Deserves
Your past is important to the timeline of your story. So give it the credit it deserves. It’s not something to be caught up in, but it's certainly not something to be ignored.
You would not be who you are today if you had not lived through what you once did.
Your ability to learn and grow is in direct proportion to the experiences you have and the mindset you choose to have about those experiences. You may not have had the choice in what you experienced, but you do have the choice in the mindset you choose to take and how you let it impact your life.
Your past life and even your past self may not be who you are anymore, but that doesn’t make them any more or less valuable.
Acknowledging that your past played a hand in who you are today is a step in giving yourself permission to move on.
Allow Yourself the Healing Needed to Close Each Chapter
In life, there’s no guarantee that you will get the closure needed to neatly conclude each chapter of your life.
Sometimes we believe that we are owed the ability to carefully wrap up each phase of our life like a present, concealing the contents inside, and delicately tying the ribbon on top, never to look back again.
I never got the chance to graduate college because I got COVID-19 just three days before graduation. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was relying on my graduation ceremony to be the mark of finishing college and beginning post-grad life.
Because I was unable to attend my graduation ceremony, I didn’t get the closure to college I thought I would, the closure I thought I deserved. This created quite a lot of chaos in my mental and emotional health for a few weeks.
More often than not, each phase of life will bleed into the next, making transitions blurry. I felt like I had not yet graduated college, but I was starting my first career.
As you transition into a new phase, it’s likely that you will also transition into a new version of yourself. This new version of yourself could be chained to your past because of open wounds or insoluble circumstances.
These chains prevent you from fully making that transition, from fully blossoming into your highest potential.
You may not be able to perfectly conclude each chapter of your life, but you can give yourself the opportunity for the healing needed to move forward.
Feeling ‘stuck’ in your old way of life or in the old version of yourself can be remedied by welcoming the process of healing into your life.
Recognize the Blessings That Are to Come
When you are in the trenches of a transition, covered in mud and feeling stuck, it’s hard to convince yourself that there is any good in this moment, any good to come at all.
Removing yourself from the situation and trying to view it from a third party vantage point allows you to regain perspective in whatever you’re experiencing.
Who you are or what your situation is today is not necessarily better or worse than who you were or what your situation was yesterday. It’s just different.
Different doesn’t inherently mean good or bad. It just means different.
Even before you experience the ‘in hindsight’ moment, you can try to understand the blessings that are at your fingertips and that are yet to still reveal themselves.
The thrust of life into a new chapter can be daunting. It can leave you wanting the life you once knew- because it’s comfortable. Because it’s familiar.
But should comfortability and familiarity be the dictators of our lives? Do you think that greatness comes from people who do things that make them feel comfortable, people who walk into the familiar?
Just because something is comfortable or familiar does not mean that it’s what’s best for us. It may have been what was best for us in the moment but things that were do not have to withstand to be.
There are many blessings that come from the new, the unfamiliar, the unknown. You just have to be willing to see them.
Real Talk
In life, we may experience transitions in which we do not have the choice but are forced to end a chapter of our book and start a new one. Even if we do have the choice, you might find yourself mourning the loss of a life you once knew, which prevents you from fully investing in the life you now know.
Everyone grows and changes, it’s a part of the human condition. If you are not currently where you once thought you would be, that’s great! You wouldn’t truly want to have the ability to accurately predict every step of your life.
Maybe your perspective or philosophies on life have changed. Maybe your deepest goals and desires have changed. Maybe you’re more in tune with your authentic self, or maybe you’re a bit out of tune.
Don’t let the ideas of your past hold you to it. Because after all, your ideas of the past may not even be accurate. We all view our past through a broken and fogged lens- time doesn’t serve our memory well either, and works against our ability to accurately portray our past to our present selves.
Whatever part of your life you thought was so great or whatever version of yourself you think was the best, may not really be true at all.
Grant yourself the permission to acknowledge and thank your past. It served you in that moment, but now no longer. Turn your focus instead, to building your future.