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not the same.

the version of you that gets sick is not the same as the one who finds healing. the version of you that falls is not the same as the one who rises up. the one they left is not the one they will find, should they ever return. the one that was hurt is not the one who forgives. the one who was so desperate is not the one who detaches.

you don’t let go the sickness and injury and rejection and pain and grasping; you become a different person. you become the one that chooses something else. the one who lives a different life, entirely. it’s not enough to desire differently. the locus of emanation doesn’t have anything to do with anything. we can desire from our couch, as the old version of ourselves: the one laying sprawled there, feeling sorry and not having any good ideas. but the one who jumps up and is suddenly out the door? that’s someone else, someone new.

when we let go the old triggers and cycles, and that same person who kept coming back into our lives behind a different face, telling the same story, we are not letting them go. we are letting go the version of ourselves that needed them. the one that called them in for a lesson only they could bring, for the exact blessing of pain we could only have tolerated from them, and no one else. why do you think God designed them to be so beautiful and compelling? we needed to be drawn in close enough, and for long enough, to force our own admission into the funeral pyre for who we used to be.