I've been thinking a lot about the concept of "moving on". . . .mostly because I'm not really sure what it means. I know what is meant when we think or tell someone they need to "move on," but what does it really mean to move on? And who gets to decide when, where, or how this outgrowing process is supposed to happen?
I have these cassette tapes that my mom sent to me when I was stationed in Germany. Denny had bought a pair of cassette tape recorder/players so that we could send correspondence back and forth via sound, so I have all of these tapes of her voice from before she died. I don't even have a way of playing them any more, but I keep them. . . .move them with me from place to place. . . .pay for space to store them, year after year. Some days I even wonder What's the point? in keeping them, but I do.
I actually have mixed feelings about these tapes, as there are multiple layers of emotion were I to listen to them, so complex and unfinished was my relationship with my mother. But I still can't imagine getting rid of them, as they hold the last tangible connection to something real and wonderful about this woman who died holding on to so many secret truths. Am I supposed to "move on" from the loss of my mom by "letting go" of these tapes recorded with layers of mixed and complex emotional content? Would I honestly feel her loss any less if I were to some how "move on" from these tapes?
The bottom line is that human beings hold on to "things" that hold some kind of emotional meaning for them, but is that a good thing or a bad thing? I'm sure the most common answer would be something to the effect that if there is a "positive" connection to it, then that is a good thing, but if there is a "negative" connection, then that is a bad thing, and the "best" course of action is to then "move on" from the thing that's causing so much negative emotion, right?
I don't think life is that black and white, or human experience that simple.
When I was in grad school, I once reflected with great warmth some stories from my military days with one of my cohorts, stories that I cherish dearly. She was not a veteran, so perhaps she just couldn't understand how these stories of belonging and instant comraderie could fill a person with such depth of warm emotion, but when I had finished telling my story, she made several comments about how I was obviously living in the "glory days," with much implication that my reverie was not healthy, and I should somehow "move on" from the telling of these outdated relic stories of my military days gone by. I was stunned.
It's not just the "negative" stories in our lives that people think we should move on from, but why is it that we're supposed to to move on from them at all?
I feel myself grow large and fierce inside of myself, fierce and protective, because I know all too well the answer to this question. But the cold hard truth is simply this: we are told to "move on" from stories that other people don't want to hear, that other people feel uncomfortable with, not because of some inherent need within ourselves to do so.
If I were to tell stories of a childhood filled with stuffed bears and cotton candy and the joys of life in the here or there of narrative landscapes falling within the boundaries of comfortable emotion, then I am not told implicitly or otherwise to move on from these stories. But stories that make other people uncomfortable? Aye, these are the stories that I am not supposed to tell, which (ironically) is the crux of the problem from the story's inception.
Aye, this is the crux of the point, indeed.
What makes an event traumatic is not the event itself, but rather the loss of a context where we can tell the story, the truth of what was real for us in the experience of the event. Human beings come through difficult events relatively unscathed all of the time, so it's not the event itself that creates the trauma. In my own experience, it was the lack of context for my stories that created the trauma for me, personally, because I wasn't able to talk about what was happening, so it remained locked up inside, like raw and corrosive poison. I learned very quickly what stories I wasn't supposed to tell, so I never told them. . . .in part because no one in my young world wanted to hear them. . . .but mostly it was because there was no one who could have helped me to process them, even if I had told them.
Keeping stories silent is not the same thing as moving on from them, nor should it ever be. . . .and thank god for people like Oprah who make it ok for people to finally tell their stories.
One of my favorite films is an animated film called Howl's Moving Castle, and one of the important characters in the film is this magical castle thing that moves around from place to place, a castle built up out of junk and debris collected along the journey, which is such a beautiful metaphor of human experience. The junk's not always beautiful, or even very useful, but it's the junk that makes us who we are. . . .for better, or for worse.
Inside of Howl's castle is a magic portal that grants access to whichever world is selected by the portal's device, with each portal connecting to a world with completely different emotional experiences. Again, such a wonderful metaphor of the complexity of human experience, how the same "door" to an experience can open up to different perspectives of a world, each with its own emotional experience. Do we choose which portal we enter? Absolutely. But is one portal inherently better than the other? On this, I'm not so certain.
There is still so much I feel mulling through me about this idea of "moving on," but the answer (in my opinion) is never a moving on from the emotional experiences of our lives, but rather an embracing and accepting of these stories as nothing more than pages within our larger story ever changing and in the process of editing and revision. Maybe some of these stories are laden with difficult emotions, but so what. . . .the emotion itself is not what creates the trauma. . . it's how other people respond to the emotion that creates the trauma. . . .especially as children, because children have not yet learned how to separate their identify from the stories they tell about ourselves, or the stories that other people tell about them.
Oprah once said, "Everything has a story." I love that. . . . everything has a story. And we do, of course, move on from the stories of our lives, just like we move on from the styles of clothes that no longer fit the character we are choosing to be. Today I packed up a very large bag of outdated clothes because they no longer fit who I am, but not because someone thought I needed to, or because someone told me that I should. I simply woke up this day feeling ready to wear a different style of clothes . . . .and so I move on.