I have trouble letting go, moving on and growing up. I want to stop moving indefinitely. I watch myself go from point A to point B and I don’t know how I got there, but I desperately want to go back. Recently I came back from a trip to St. Maarten, and on the plane coming home, I was sad not because we were leaving, but because it had ended. All I have left now are the memories of the beach and the sand in my toes, and even though I could go back tomorrow if I really wanted to, I will never be the person I was yesterday. My self-concept is fleeting–it is the most permanent of my memories that remain immortalized in a specific time and place. I will never be as young as I am in my memories, I will never again experience what I have experienced in the moment. I cannot stop moving forward, no matter how hard I try to propel myself backward. I will never again be that inwardly-terrified-outwardly-defiant 9-year-old girl who thought she could trick herself and everyone around her that strength came in the form of isolation and independence. I will never again be a child in my parent’s house, despite my insistence that I am treated as one. I am 20 years old, I am a “woman,” technically, or at least I pretend to be sometimes. I think that on the surface I probably resemble a relatively confident and normal adult, but that is never once how I have felt underneath. I long for the safety of childhood, the sheltered naiveté of adolescence. I long to be that 9-year-old girl with her chest puffed out and her whole life ahead of her. I have had a good life so far, but it has gone so fast.

I think many of us struggle with the concept of letting go; that has to be the reason why all around me I see people torturing themselves over past mistakes and regrets. That has to be the reason my best friend calls me in the middle of the night sobbing about her most recent breakup or the reason I stay up at night going over everything I have done wrong that day. I don’t know why it is so hard to move on, but perhaps it has something to do with the emptiness of leaving. I have always felt like moving on was, in a way, leaving that part of your life behind. And while it is necessary to do this in order to live and progress, I can’t help but notice the emptiness that follows. I feel almost as if I have left a piece of myself in every experience and every memory, and my entire life up until now has been an effort to retrieve those pieces.

I want my dad to pick me up and carry me like I weigh nothing, I want to walk down the beautifully painted hallways of my elementary school and sit down in a classroom that is not too small for me. I want to go back and study for the SAT more and experience the summer before college when I truly had everything: friends, a boyfriend and plans for a bright future. I want to go back and do so many things over, but for the life of me I cannot find the reset button. It has always been hard for me to accept the fact that I cannot go back, that everything that has been done cannot be undone or relived. However, when I can finally reel myself back in to the reality of how the world works, I remember that if I could go back in time and change what I have done, I would not be where I am today. And in some instances, that might be a good thing, but in most, it would not be. I don’t want to relive the hardships I have faced, I don’t want to experience loss and grief and pain all over again, but I would not trade those experiences for anything because my personality, character, and strength are all a result from these challenges. I wish that I could be a child again, but I have only just begun to see the world as an adult and I do not know what the future holds. I could be the happiest I have ever been in 5, 10, maybe even 15 years, but I have to allow myself to get there instead of digging my feet in and trying to stop myself from moving on. Letting go is one of the hardest parts of life, but the reality of it all is that you cannot move backwards, so you might as well move forwards.