Moving on
An Aha Moment Analysis on grief
Last night I snuggled under my blanket to continue watching “And Just Like That,” the new Sex and the City series on HBO Max.
I came across a scene where Carrie Bradshaw (our main character and a writer in the show who I am slowly feeling a kindred connection with) starts reading an excerpt from her book.
In the show she is a widow and has written a beautiful book on the grief of losing someone, and in this scene, she is doing a reading for an audience and she reads something out loud to this effect:
Carrie Bradshaw: “I thought that over time my grief would shrink, that it wouldn’t fill every inch of me like it had for so long. My sadness never shrank but I grew, and grew until I was so large, the grief just felt smaller. And then I realized it was time. You don’t move on because you’re ready to. You move on because you’ve outgrown who you used to be.”
Eyes growing wide, popcorn midair almost to my mouth but stopped just before: I blindly reached for the remote not wanting to take my eyes away from the TV screen, from that moment, from that BRILLIANT AHA MOMENT... that beautiful, poetic, captivating and life changing statement that Carrie Bradshaw had just made.
I paused. Because my superpower magical brain had to think about what she had just said.
I had to chew, analyze and spit out the impact of that statement.
How many times had I grieved in my life and not understood... how or why I had been able to move on.
It boggled my mind every time, how we, as humans, are able to move forward from tragedy, heartbreak and loss... and we move on and the world carries forward.
Did we just put a Band-Aid on it?? Did it ever disappear?
Taylor Swift in one of her lyrics said, “Band-Aids don’t fix bullet holes” and that really resonated with me because I always wondered, where did that grief go????
You didn’t forget that person, that moment, those memories. There are people in my life whom at one point I thought “I could never live without them” but yet here I am today... thriving and enjoying my life.
But what??? How?? Where did it go?
Was I betraying them by moving on?
Did I never love them in the first place?
These are the questions I used to ask myself not knowing how I was able to move forward every time...
But I grew, and grew until I was so large, the grief just felt smaller.
Key number one: I grew and grew and grew until I was so large.
This. This is the crux of it.
When that person, thing, place or situation exits your life in this revolving door of human experiences: You have to carry forward and do different things, meet different people... experience the world another way... without them.
You have no choice.
You have no choice at that point and that’s the most painful part of moving on. But in that moving forward and in these new experiences, your being, soul, experiences, emotions and heart... grow.
Grow and grow and grow.
The grief... that’s still there, just as big as it was. But what of your new person?? What about your growth???
You don’t move on because you’re ready to. You move on because you’ve outgrown who you used to be.
Key Number 2: You don’t move on because you’re ready to, you move on because you’ve outgrown who you used to be.
NO. You’re never ready to move on.
You’re not ready to let go of that love, that experience, that memory, that piece of your life. It was near and dear to you in the most soul fulfilling way... but... When you have outgrown who you used to be... when you are NO LONGER THE SAME PERSON... then you... must by logic... Move on. For YOU are not the SAME person.
I sat there, still frozen, popcorn STILL suspended in mid-air like time itself had stopped.
WHAT THE F... OMG.
Somebody had finally explained it.
All this time, all these years of moving on from people and moments I swore would destroy me... and here was the answer, spelled out in an HBO Max series while I sat in my pajamas.
It was relief.
It was permission.
It was the lifting of a weight I didn’t even know I’d been carrying.
I’d always felt like maybe I was a bad person for being able to move on. Like there was something cold or broken in me that allowed me to keep living, keep loving, keep thriving after loss.
But now? Now I understood. The grief never got smaller. It’s still there, all of it, every ounce as heavy and real as the day it arrived. But I grew. I grew and grew and grew until I was so large that the same grief just... fit differently inside me.
This whole time, I thought moving on was about them... about forgetting, about dishonoring, about leaving someone behind.
But it was never about them at all.
It was about me.
About becoming someone new.
Someone bigger.
Someone who could hold both the grief AND the joy.
Both the memory AND the future.
I finally unpaused the show, but everything felt different now. Lighter. I wasn’t outgrowing my grief.
I was outgrowing myself. And that... that’s not betrayal.
That’s being human
With love and joy
Pauleen