It's time to move on
There's a line between emotional processing and wallowing in the past, and I think I've crossed it
Yesterday, my boyfriend came home from work and found me halfway through rereading an old journal, 2023-25.
“Babe,” he said, “what are you doing? Why are you so obsessed with the past?”
So much of my writing on this blog has been about trying to process one particular thing in my past, over and over, like Lady Macbeth scrubbing again and again at a stain that isn’t even really there. I’ve attacked it from so many different angles: frameworks for approaching conflict, musings on the societal impact of the pandemic, light-hearted interludes, and plenty of straight-up trauma dumping. I’ve kept scrubbing at that stain, picking at that scab, for the past six months.
My life since I moved here nine years ago only has one narrative. It has only been about that one thing, everything defined as before or during or after it. Which is so dumb, because I don’t even care about that thing anymore. I’ve realized I want a new narrative, one that’s about literally anything else. Preferably something positive, but more than anything, just Not That.
There’s this bit in The Time Traveler’s Wife — the main character time travels involuntarily, can’t control where he goes or when, and he is continually drawn, throughout his life, to the scene of his mother’s death. He finds himself there again and again, watching it unfold from all angles, powerless to change what he knows is going to happen.
He can, at least, wrap a blanket around his younger self, who is watching it happen for the first time. I can’t even do that.
Some of my Inkhaven friends have been trying to help me escape my focus on the past. When I was in France, one of my friends was constantly exhorting me to talk of only the present and future, and another made me switch back to French when I got too worked up about conflicts in my life, because I am not good enough at French to rant nonstop about complex emotional issues in it. Another friend expressly doesn’t want to know anything about any community gossip, and it’s shockingly refreshing to not talk about who has dated who or how any given person may have minorly slighted me five years ago. Who fucking cares! How freeing.
And then there are all the people encouraging me to get the hell out of here, where all my context has collapsed on top of me and is massively weighing me down at all times. Thanks, friends.
I’ve done a lot of emotional processing on this blog, and much of it has been helpful to me. But where’s the line between helpful emotional processing and just wallowing in the past? Wherever it is, I think I’ve crossed it.
I’ve posted a lot of what I did because I wanted someone specific to read it and to respond in a certain way. Sometimes it’s been good; it’s helped me communicate with people and feel closer to them. But I think I write so much about the thing that hurt me because I feel that the people who were there never understood, and I wanted to just hit them over the head with it until they couldn’t possibly deny it anymore. This is a stupid reason to write. Not just because it hasn’t worked, at all, even though I know they read this blog, but because it’s just ill-conceived from the start. I cannot make other people feel anything, and I just need to accept that and move on.
So! I am hereby placing a two-month ban on myself writing about the pandemic, community conflict, or anything related to that whole thing. That means no blog posts, but also no poems or songs.
Nothing has been resolved, but it’s probably never going to be. Just drop it, just make art about something else. I’m sure there are other things a person could think about. Honeybees. Pianos. Bureaucracy. Death. Whatever.
It’s time to move on.