I Don't Know How to Move On

There is this question that has been following me around for years now, and no matter how much older I get, I still don’t know how to answer it. How do you move on from something that never really gave you a proper ending? I don’t even mean a relationship. I mean anything.

Like a friendship that became shorter and quieter until one day it totally disappeared. A version of yourself that you can’t seem to become again. A dream that looked so real when you were younger and now only visits you every once in a while, just enough to remind you that it existed. People always say, “You’ll move on, someday, sometime”, as if it’s something our bodies naturally know how to do, like breathing or blinking.

I wish it were that easy. I think my heart has missed that lesson. Mine doesn’t know how to leave. It just keeps collecting things. Old conversations. Places. Birthdays. Promises people probably don’t even remember making, but I remember. It keeps stacking them somewhere inside me, and every now and then one of them falls over, and suddenly I’m thinking about someone I haven’t spoken to in three years as if I just saw them yesterday.

I think that’s why I get tired so easily. It isn’t work. It isn’t college. It isn’t adulthood. It’s carrying around so many unfinished feelings that never found a place to go. Sometimes I look at people who seem so light and calm, and I wonder what they do differently. How do they laugh without remembering every version of themselves that no longer exists? How do they walk past places without feeling the need to stop? How do they meet new people without comparing them to the ones who left?

Maybe they don’t.

Maybe everyone is pretending a little.

Maybe everyone has a room inside their head where old memories sit quietly, waiting for the smallest thing to wake them up. A smell. A rainy evening. A song that used to mean everything. I don’t think sadness is loud most of the time. I think it hides inside ordinary moments. You’re washing dishes and suddenly you remember someone’s laugh. You’re waiting for your food order and you remember a conversation from years ago. You’re trying to sleep, and your brain decides tonight is the perfect night to replay every goodbye that never felt complete.

The strange part is that I don’t even want those moments back exactly the way they were. I think I just want to feel the way I felt when I was living them. There was a time when I believed life was always building toward something. Every birthday felt exciting because I thought the next year would change everything. Every new semester felt like a fresh start. Every January felt important to make new decisions. Somewhere along the way, those feelings became quieter. The years started moving faster than I could understand them.

I blinked and people had different lives. I blinked and old group chats stopped lighting up. I blinked and the places that once felt so familiar became places I only visited in my head. Nobody tells you that growing up isn’t only about gaining things. It’s also about watching little pieces of your life disappear without making a sound. You don’t even notice them leaving until one day you try to go back, and they aren’t there anymore.

A few days ago I was reading submissions for this piece, and one of them made me stop after almost every paragraph. It was written by Finnley Taylor. I remember closing my laptop for a few minutes because I didn’t know what to do with the feeling it left behind. It wasn’t that our lives were the same. They weren’t. It was the strange comfort of realizing that someone else had been asking questions I didn’t even know how to ask myself. Sometimes another person’s writing doesn’t give you answers. It simply walks into the room you’ve been sitting in alone and says, “I’ve been here too.”

Finnley Taylor’s essay:

I think I keep expecting a lighter feeling to come. Each time something good happens, I wait for its end, and I will myself to find something to laugh about. Every fond thing. Every moment I should be capturing—it’s all turned into something lacking in beauty. The trees are just decoration. The sky is just blue. I smile when I think there’s a reason to. So I sit down to write only when I feel motivated. I breathe simply to survive.

But God, I’ve come to really hate that feeling. How can I live the rest of my life, living only when I feel like I’m good enough to make a life worth something?

I’ve been stuck for a few years. The expectation always outweighs the outcome. I think ahead to every milestone I know I’m so close to reaching. When the day comes, my head hits the pillow like I’ve lost all complete meaning.

Do I just not understand this? Life, embracing every way it shows me? The seasons are supposed to bring closure, and I know I should look at the sky, to the stars and to the rest of the galaxy and think, I’m so lucky to be alive. I can put definition to every inanimate thing.

But you know I can’t. You know I’m always stuck. I might as well shake hands with Change, wave the white flag in its face. Scream, fine, you win. I can’t ever recall a time where I felt content sketching the end of the chapter, putting the book back on its shelf.

And so many friends I’ve lost, people who found it easier to walk out than wade hand-in-hand through the utter stagnancy I long for every day. Because I know they don’t understand.

I see things so differently than other people, and I know I do. I see the tilt of their heads, the squint of their eyes when I simply breeze by a burned tree. I shake my head at the snow angels they’ve etched into the ice. I root myself into the dirt, and they’ll only look back once, wait just a few minutes before they walk the path to moving on. But it is all just the same to me. The seasons aren’t really change if you’ve seen it before, right?

Has anything ever been real change? The laughter is in response to jokes old and same. The dead trees from forest fires. We know what comes next, and feigned wonder makes me tired. The snow angels you and your friends engrave into the earth. How can I enjoy anything, when I know the outcome already? Attempt to stay friends with people when I move away, when I know the ending won’t alter from the last time. We’ll fall out anyway. Nothing changes.

The trees, the trees. Maybe, maybe, I have my morals bent to a negative degree. The sky just doesn’t change anymore. The words I write don’t make sense anymore. I should want to bend people’s lives with all these sentences. But I forgot what the compliments feel like—any that once mattered echo dead in my ears. Like that one girl who promised me we’d stay in touch, and now it’s been month after month.

When it hurts, what helps? Let’s see. Hey, Change, what do you think about me? A contrarian pessimist with positivity deprivation. Maybe. Maybe, maybe, maybe they’re all right about me. Maybe you’re right about me.

Am I worthy of you yet? Can you brighten my life with the unexpected? I implore you, and I beg, I beg and beg and beg, and I have stopped wanting you. I have stopped moving forward. Change. I personify you just so I can feel better about myself.

The lighter feeling is not what you bring. If stillness won’t bring it either, where do I go now? I only write when I’m motivated, listening to this stupidly sad Olivia Rodrigo song. I look to the sky and see endless nothing, wish the trees to burst into decorative flames. I hate you, Change, I’m afraid of you. What does that say about me?

After I finished reading her piece, I kept thinking about how much energy we spend waiting for our lives to begin. We tell ourselves everything will make sense after the next achievement, after the next city, after the next friendship, after the next version of ourselves finally arrives. We keep making deals with the future. “Just let me get there, and then I’ll be happy.” The problem is that the future keeps moving.

You reach the thing you wanted, you smile for a little while, and then your heart quietly starts looking for another finish line. It isn’t greedy. It isn’t ungrateful. I think it’s scared. Scared that if it stops chasing something, it’ll have to sit with everything it has been avoiding. Maybe that is why moving on feels so impossible. We spend so much time running toward tomorrow that we never stop to grieve yesterday.

I don’t think moving on is forgetting. I used to believe that. I thought healing meant reaching a point where certain names no longer meant anything to you, where old places became ordinary, where memories stopped visiting in the middle of the night. Now I think healing is much quieter than that. I think it is remembering without asking the memory to give you your old life back.

It is accepting that some people were only meant to know one version of you. It is understanding that some chapters did exactly what they were supposed to do, even if they ended earlier than you wanted. Most of all, I think it is forgiving yourself for still missing things that are gone. We are always told to let go, yet nobody teaches us how. Nobody explains what to do with love after it has nowhere to go. Nobody explains where old dreams live after we stop chasing them. We figure it out one ordinary day at a time.

I wish someone had given me a list like this when I was trying so hard to move on. It wouldn't have fixed everything overnight, but maybe it would have reminded me that healing isn't one big moment. It's a hundred small choices you make without realizing they matter. So if you're reading this while holding onto something you can't seem to let go of, maybe start here.

I can’t promise these things will help, but if I could sit across from you for an evening and tell you everything I’ve learned while trying to move on, this is probably what I’d leave you with.

• Buy yourself flowers before you convince yourself nobody else will.

• Stop visiting memories that never invite you to leave feeling better.

• Don’t turn one person’s absence into proof that everyone will leave.

• Let some messages stay unsent. They don’t always need another ending.

• Find a place in your city that knows nothing about your past, and visit it often.

• Listen to a song until it belongs to this version of your life instead of the old one.

• Rearrange your room. Sometimes your heart follows your surroundings.

• Eat at a restaurant you’ve been saving for “the right occasion.” Tuesday is enough.

• Stop treating every goodbye like evidence that you are difficult to love.

• Buy the notebook. Wear the outfit. Burn the expensive candle. Stop saving your life for later.

• Learn people’s middle names. Ask them about their childhood. Keep proving to yourself that there are still stories you haven’t heard yet.

• Leave your phone at home once in a while and remind yourself that the world still exists without notifications.

• Let strangers stay strangers. You don’t have to turn everyone into forever.

• Become someone your younger self would run toward, not someone your past keeps pulling back.

• Keep making plans with the version of you that still believes good things are coming.

• Sit on a park bench and make up stories about strangers. It reminds you that everyone is carrying something.

• Stop expecting people to miss you the same way you miss them.

• Buy books you’ve never heard anyone recommend.

• Learn to enjoy your birthday without measuring who remembered.

• Visit a bookstore with no intention of buying anything. And collect sentences and write them down in your notes.

• Keep a note on your phone called “Things that made today worth staying for.” Add to it whenever life surprises you.

• Don’t make a home out of people who keep leaving.

• Stop saying “I wish I had...” and start asking, “Can I still?”

• Give yourself permission to outgrow the person who hurt you.

• Don’t keep people alive in your head after they’ve stopped showing up in your life.

• Find one tree you always wave at. It sounds silly until it becomes part of your routine.

• Read old diary entries only to meet your younger self, not to judge them.

• Stop treating every lonely evening like proof you’re failing at life.

• Buy postcards from places you’ve never been and promise yourself you’ll go one day.

• Don’t rush to replace people. Learn the shape of your own company first.

• Stop apologizing for crying.

• Learn something completely useless just because it makes you curious.

• Remember that your life is allowed to become unrecognizable.

• Collect tiny proofs that life is still happening: a receipt, a train ticket, a pressed flower, a movie stub, a scribbled note.

• Keep making plans six months from now. Your future deserves your confidence.

• Become curious about the person you’ll be next year.

• Let some places miss you too.

• Learn the names of the birds that wake you up every morning.

• Take more blurry photos. They usually hold the best memories.

• Don’t spend your whole walk looking at your phone. The sky has been trying to get your attention.

• Keep introducing yourself to the world as if it still has something beautiful waiting to introduce back.

None of these things will make the pain disappear today. They won't erase the people you miss or rewrite the endings you wish had been different. They simply give your heart another place to look instead of always looking behind. One day you'll realize you've gone an entire afternoon without carrying the same heaviness. Then an entire day. Then a week. You probably won't notice the exact moment it happened, and maybe that's the beautiful part.

Co-Author Substack ID: Finnley Taylor