And the struggle with change continues
On impermanence, losing people, and learning to live with what cannot be bought back.
I’ve always struggled with change, whether it is people, places, things, jobs, or health. Just life in general. Even when it is the change I’ve been looking forward to, say landing a new job or moving to a city of my dreams. It always makes me feel something that I never want to feel—a sort of resistance.
The journey to make it better, and not crumble at every change, started with me acknowledging that change is constant and inevitable. We cannot control it; no one can. And trying to control it only makes it more difficult and brings you more suffering. But then to keep going about life despite the change is to understand that nothing stays the same — Impermanence. That fact stuck with me and freed me in many aspects, but one thing: people.
Get C’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
You would never have warning; that’s the thing with life, isn’t it? There never is one. You’d think you’d prepare yourself mentally to face it if you had one. But no, change doesn’t work that way. It sneaks up on you when you’d least expect it. Like how sand sweeps under your feet and leaves you wobbling. Everything changes. Who are we humans to promise anything about change? Except that there will be change. You lose people. They change, fade away. Just like anything else, we fade away from people’s lives and from Earth one day. But having to live with that and still keep showing up, go on with my life, is one of the hardest things I ever had to do. I mean, at this point, just knowing things, knowing the facts, acknowledging that people will change, doesn’t make the pain, suffering that comes from their departure any less. This is even worse, isn’t it? Being able to understand doesn’t cancel out the pain. And there is just endlessness to it.
I have come to notice how, with time, the intensity goes down. Time, ironically, is what helps you heal and feel the pain less enormous, yet it’s also the one thing that’s hardest to give yourself. You want to stop feeling the pain immediately. All those sudden moments of weakness and heavy-heartedness you’d feel in a day while you are in the midst of your work or daily chores, waking up to a dream of them and struggling to catch your breath, won’t disappear in a day. Some random person, a song, a pen, a book, a movie, a word, a picture, a video, a date on a calendar, a time on the watch — everything around you won’t just stop reminding you of them in a day. You find yourself ruminating about all the memories you have of them, all the moments, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and wonder how fast everything went by. What else was I expecting? For them to stay the same, forever? (Funny word, that one, forever) Are you a fool, C? (I ask myself) You keep longing for those moments that will never happen again. One moment, will in actual literal sense can never come back. The next moment will not and can never be the same. You keep longing for the person gone and never coming back. Now, they are just a memory, a voice in your head. And how you didn’t and never wanted it to be this way. There is nothing one can do but to just live with that!
Part of the reason why change brings so much pain is that you aren’t just losing the person; you are also losing the version of you that existed with them. They know parts of you that you yourself cannot remember or know, and when they are gone, those parts are gone too. The line is easily blurred between losing a part or version of you and losing yourself completely. The latter is where it gets difficult to live your own life. You forget that it even existed. And you can’t even find yourself a ground to sit down with all that.
That is where I am at — trying to find ground when I can’t even find myself.
