As I was digging through some of my old journals, I found a couple of pages on my thoughts and feelings about losing someone you love. Due to the timing of the entry (2015), I’m guessing this related to my ex. I wanted to share this because it’s crazy how wise young Marissa was after such a heartbreaking incident and how true these words still ring today.
Losing someone. There’s really no lesson in life on losing someone you love. The depth of pain isn’t quite something that you explain to others, it’s a wordless ache leaving you to drown yourself in music hoping to forget, hoping to understand, hoping to have them back.
Every person in your life instills something into who you are – there’s a piece of them in you and a piece of you in them. The closer you are to someone, the more pieces of yourself you lose when they’re gone. These pieces are stories, memories, feelings, thoughts, remembering.
How can you ever fully recover from this loss when you’ve lost some of yourself too?
The beautiful but terrifying part of life is that it’s always changing. People are always growing, learning, making new memories. And so it goes for those who have lost pieces of themselves to those who’ve left.
We must rebuild.
We wake up in the morning with a fresh start and new hopes. We try new things, some that scare us because they’re so far out of our comfort zone and some that remind us of our former selves and feel like home.
Every experience, every new hobby, every new person we meet restores a little of what we’ve lost in the wreckage. We find that life continues to move forward and that sometimes pain and loss bring about more depth and layers to ourselves than before we knew heartache.
One day we wake up and see the sun again. Not see it, but actually see it. We see the landscape differently, we connect with those we don’t know better for it. We understand that life tastes a little more bitter because of all the sadness and loss in the world, but it also tastes a little sweeter because we’ve grown to see what’s important and to never give up hope.
And I suppose that’s the great irony of loss: that you can never truly move on, yet you can grow and push forward despite all of this.
There is beauty in the rebuilding.
-Marissa
