To live a good life, some day you just have to give up the pain. All those years of nothingness, all that struggle. It never ends to your expectation.
At some point all that carries you on is a strange momentum of feeling. You should have changed. Everything was right for it. But instead you carry on in the same way out of habit. “This is just how I am” you tell yourself. This is a part of me. This is the only part of me. And so you break again, against all odds. You fight to be broken again, pushing against your own emotions and resurrecting your own misery from the ashes.
At some point you ask that question: “why haven’t I changed?” Familiar desperation fills your heart, desperation to feel something else. So you shove yourself down with blow after blow “why,” “why,” “why.” You want to feel happy, so you fight your sadness. The movements of your struggle make waves. And these waves crash again and again on the walls of your heart shaking it again to its core. You feel bad about the feeling bad and make yourself feel worse.
You survive on the faith that one day the clouds will open, and the sun will shine down on your face, washing away every bad thing in your life, and all will be saved; every miserable thing suddenly joyous. But you keep your eyes fixed on the ground.
Salvation is an unnecessary gamble. You could have moved on this whole time—laid it down and cast it aside. But after all these years, can you really let yourself? There’s a sunk cost to the sadness; that you now expect it all to have a payoff. The truth is that you cling to it out of fear, and that as long as you do, you’ll never be truly happy.
The worst thing of all of it is this: sadness does not end with a payoff. There is no final chapter that sets you free with perfect catharsis. You became free one day and didn’t notice, because that day was of no importance.
One day you just have to let it all go, put who you once were behind you. Set aside all that sadness and pain; leave it behind and never come back. Go be the new person you didn’t notice you could be. Go be the new and better person who is finally free. Free from the pain and the misery at last.
The ending is not grand. The story does not work like that; this is not art. The truly artistic ending can never be in real life. This is the realm of humans and human affairs. Here, there is nothing more powerful than a hand, reaching, grasping, and finally—picking up the scissors with a deft motion—cutting: a perfect snip of the thread of that past life. And afterwards, to watch the sadness and the person you are no longer spiral into the void as you cut their final lifeline; your own attachment to them. That is the greatest thing in the world, the greatest story. But a story cannot be written without a person, without a character, and it is only through your choices and the making of your character that you can finally be realized. That you can rise above it all at last.
So, cut away the things that are no longer good; that are no longer necessary. Set yourself free from that burden of consistency, from that idle clinging to the not-good. Clip that weight of which you have forgotten so that you can find yourself at last, soaring through the sky on silver wings. The clouds below you mirroring the brilliance of the sun, so that no matter where you look your soul is flooded with that great light that for so long you have not seen.
