But you have changed
I was talking about relationships with a friend the other day and we were talking about how people change so that we are continuously evolving and can never go back and recreate relationships from the past; all relationships have to evolve to be meaningful.
With another friend recently, one of the things that I was counseling her about is her career. She went through a life changing event in the last two years and she was lamenting that her performance at work wasn’t up to par during that period and she wanted her bosses to know that – duh is all I could tell her – but then I told her to think differently, perhaps she clung to that miserable job because she was going through a horrific time and couldn’t afford another change in her life. But now, on the other side of that enormous event, she has changed, irrevocably, and so she now understands she no longer needs to perform for them to believe she is good, she no longer needs this job that wrests out of her every available source of energy, her priorities have shifted so far to the other side that she can no longer accept what was and that maybe all of this has nothing to do with whether she did a good job as she went through a tragedy, but the real truth is that the tragic event has made her a different person. And that’s not a bad thing. Maybe the job is a bad thing.
Maybe relationships end because the couple were not evolving individually or together.
Maybe big upheavals change our mental parameters so that our priorities shift and we never return to where we were.
Maybe change is neither bad nor good, but we are different nonetheless afterwards.
Forget what was, this is what is.