The Moral of the Story

Memories. They are the things we’re made of. The things that bring us together and sometimes the things that tear us apart.

Recently, I was lying in bed on my phone and I found myself looking through pictures and then I found myself in the “screenshots” album. In there I found screenshots of text messages from different people––friends, old friends, ex-friends, ex-girlfriends, strangers, and a gamut of people I may never speak to ever again. In those screenshots I found all sorts of things––humor, pain, anger, angst, good advice, bad advice, cries for help, and everything in between.

It was like going down memory lane except I was watching a narrative unfold––a narrative that I was infinitely involved in creating. I watched in my head as the story came to life. Looking at the different snippets from my own history, I realized that I had grown into a completely different person than I was back then. But thats the thing about stories––in the end, they all have morals.

Time to be vulnerable. As an example, I came across an exchange between me and my best friend, Sam. At the time I was dealing with a lot. I was in the heart of my dissertation, one of my most important friendships was starting to deteriorate, and I was working a job where I had little direction and was unsure if what I was doing the right thing to do. In the exchange, I’m explaining to Sam how lost I feel and how uneasy things had become. I was trying to save my friendship with this person, but I was dealing with a competing personality, all the while trying to maintain my sanity with school and work.

I always thought I was good at multitasking. I always felt like I did a pretty good job at being good at work, school, and maintaining a social life––but (in reality) all of it was falling apart. I was in the midst of learning powerful lessons about the investment of time. I was learning about love and forgiveness. I came to the realization that no one was going to save me, but me. I came to realize that relationships do fall apart. At the time, however, I was doing everything I could to save them when what I should have been doing was bracing for impact.

There were other conversations in those screenshots. One with a person, who I hardly knew. She and I were struggling to define our relationship and while it didn’t work out, I’m glad I got to know her while I did. 

Another with a person, who again, I hardly knew––and I saw that we butted heads to a degree not known to man. And while I know the reasons as to why this friendship didn’t pan out, the repercussions of our inability to define our friendship paved the way for an even greater loss.

There were some with a person who I knew well, a person who I’d invested a tremendous amount of time in. I saw that after years of discontent, we were once again circling an inevitable drain so much so that we eventually fell in.

I came across an old roommate who’d I since lost touch with and the memories of being twenty somethings in America. Memories that brought a smile to my face.

 I came across jokes and funny moments memorialized through time and space. I found myself in fits of laughter reliving some of the funniest moments that I thought to save forever.

 I came across raw moments, me giving someone advice that I wish I’d gotten when I was their age. I always felt like I could have been a different person if I’d had someone giving me the type of advice, I often found myself giving others.

 I traveled back as far as 2014 when Goose and I were trolling twitter and eating all the food we could get our hands on. It was an incredible adventure. And while there were certainly things I wish I could change, apologies I wish I could share, conversations I wish I could pick back up, I’m grateful for where it all brought me. We spend so much time in the shoulds and coulds and woulds that we don’t always see what’s right in front of us. I for one tend to think about some of the choices I’ve made and I find myself wondering if I made the right decision––looking through some of those screenshots, I can see clearly why I decided to end some relationships or why I decided to take certain steps, but I can also see the other side now––a side that was unknown to me at the time. We may not be able to change the past, but we can certainly learn from it. Our capacity to look back in the history of life and wonder what we could have done is matched only by our hope for a better future for ourselves.

 So yeah, some relationships had to end, some friendships had to end, some relationships had to change, some risk had to be taken, some measures had to be had. But in the same respect, some of those same relationships and friendships could have been preserved, but I guess we’ll never know.

 In any case, I found solace in some of the more important decisions I’d made––decisions to end relationships, friendships, jobs, but what’s more, I found that history and memory and the ghosts of our past really do shape us into the people we’ve become. If we advance our capacity to learn from our past––what’s to say we can’t build ourselves an even brighter future.

Thats the moral of the story.