My girlfriend had to physically pick up my hands and bash them against the keyboard to get me to write the introduction to this article.
It seems an apt example of how life never seems to leave you alone. There are moments where everything has screwed up so irreparably or things impede you so drastically that it is impossible to continue. In times when every aspect of your life is going completely batshit bonkers and falling like prices on Black Friday, life has an annoying tendency to just keep going—with, without or with pieces of you trailing along behind it.
Now, I’ve been around more than most. I’m no Carmen Sandiego or anything, but I’ve had my knocks and bumps. From international divorce settlements to hit and runs to leukaemia, my life has not exactly been Gucci by Gucci. On the other hand, I would not be here today without all the shit that life threw at me. The only way I have been able to pick up and move on is with time. And yes, time stretched out and crushed like a slinky down an Aztec temple stairs. But it levelled out. There is always a time when an issue stops impeding you and becomes history.
But to say someone can just pick themselves up and move on is like saying turtles carry the Earth: it’s not something that just happens. It takes patience and time, neither of which seem to make themselves handy when shit hits the fan. On top of that, there are people that can say there are some things that you “just can’t get over”. That is equally daft. Regardless of how life fucks with you, there is always a point where we can look back on it and deal with it as something that simply happened, not as an ongoing concern. Everything passes from present to past eventually.
The issue is that in times of stress and despair, be it exam woes or family deaths, time really does seem to fuck with you. Either life will hook itself up to a car battery and leave you in the dust or throw its hands up and refuse to do anything at all. But no matter how strange the shift is, time moves linearly—excruciatingly so—and does not stop, slow or speed up. However much you want to fast forward that bad memory, you can’t. Accepting a change in life takes time, and the only sure-fire method is waiting it out until you are comfortable with the change.
When this process naturally occurs—and with emphasis on naturally—then you can look back and retrospectively reflect on the experience. Any time before that and you are so caught up in bias, denial or grief that the result will only dig your trench deeper. But it’s in this state when the experience ceases to be a conflict and you can find closure. It could take months, years, decades—and you could bounce in and out of this stage like an indecisive guinea pig. But, eventually, you find you can observe and garner what good came out of the quagmire rather than the situation dragging you back into more doldrums.
There are times when that moment seems non-existent. There are times when everything seems so dire that everything fizzles out and goes dark. But no matter your race, gender or creed, there is always an end to these emotional slums. Time doesn’t stop for you, so you shouldn’t stop for it. Picking up and moving on isn’t easy, but I’ll be honest. That moment of leaving that baggage behind is worth every second of endurance through the shit days.