The Losses We Choose and the Ones That Choose Us.

What could have been vs. what wants to be.

What could have been.

I’m moving to San Diego at the end of the week, after months of considering every other possibility. The decision emerged after declining a job somewhere entirely different, that I’d really wanted and spent weeks interviewing for. In the few days before the offer came, I felt the unmistakable creeping feeling of being already over it—of having moved on internally without yet being able to acknowledge that what I’d been planning for would likely not unfold. 

I am not unfamiliar with sweeping life changes, nor am I a stranger to the bridge between voids. In fact, this seems to be characteristic of my reality: I regularly find myself dramatically (and hopefully gracefully) leaving one thing to stride across to the next dark stretch of uncertainty.

I find that when life clearly defines the end of a chapter, I enter a state of reflective grief. This arises without my conscious intent; my mind begins to revisit various periods of transition, endings, and losses. It’s like all of the grief I’ve felt prior gets packaged up and sent back for me to experience again, differently. 

The ending I’m faced with now is not punctuated by extreme loss or grief, which may be making the ground even more fertile for reflection. No one has died recently, nor am I heartbroken or struggling to be ok. I am remarkably fine amidst wildly fluctuating moods—I am excited, really. Not afraid of, but rather enchanted by, the possibilities of what may come next.

Life continues to show me that endings and beginnings are intertwined. Each ending bleeds into the beginning of a new cycle: they depend on one another. Entering what is next requires letting go of what has been. You cannot bring everything with you, and sometimes, you aren’t even sure what you’re leaving behind until you have left it.

The losses we choose and the ones that choose us.

Making any choice involves leaving others on the table. When I left my life in Chicago a few months ago, I did so knowing that I would incur great loss. In some ways, moving was similar (but not equivalent) to a death. I would never be able to get back what once was there, for it was already gone. Accepting this inevitability of loss felt, to me, like a relief. It was more comforting, certainly, than deluding myself that I could ever return to how I wanted things to be, or to the way things had been for a rose-tinted period of time.

We are not always so fortunate to have the illusion of making a choice; many times, life decides for us. To think we are in control of what happens is at best naïve, and more often, ignorant or egotistic. Regardless of how much personal agency we believe ourselves to possess, we do not call most of the shots. As Kathryn Schulz writes in her stunning memoir Lost and Found, experiencing loss forces us to reckon with this lack of control. She says, beautifully, that loss is “a harsh corrective to our sense of being central, competent, and powerful...To lose something is a profoundly humbling act.”

It is natural for us to try to negotiate life’s terms to suit our wants and needs. We may act in vain to keep someone or something, despite all signs indicating imminent departure. We may refuse to acknowledge when an ending has truly arrived, or resist letting go. These inclinations can function as a sort of self-preservation—a way to stave off pain or fear.

Aside from bargaining or denial, we may also attempt to deal with loss by spending vast amounts of time trying to make sense of what happened. Our minds will dependably come up with many unreliable answers to the question of ‘why?’ Asking ‘why’ can serve to incite curiosity and imagination, and is one way the mind uses contemplation for good. In fits of uncertainty, however, this tendency to question everything can spiral us into despair or self-pity.

Wondering why the past happened as it did can be brutal, and is likely to be fruitless. It is easy to glamorize what we are not currently experiencing, or to get lost in that space of ‘what if’. It is harder to be present with the deep unknown future, and is harder still to sit with the possibility that there may not be a reason; that it just happened; that it is just over.

No amount of negotiating or sense-making will allow us to transcend impermanence and the mysterious, perplexing nature of endings. As Schulz writes, “loss calls on us to reckon with this universal impermanence—with the baffling, maddening, heartbreaking fact that something that was just here can be, all of a sudden, just gone.”

Longing for the moment at which all becomes clear and we feel content is a disorienting and futile endeavor. This state of clear contentment may be found, in fact, right in this moment. The past happened the way it did, and we’re here, now. Maybe if things cannot be understood, they can just be felt. Maybe the experience itself is what it was all for.

What wants to be.

Loss of any kind can serve to initiate us into a new chapter—one that we did not plan for, but which may be the most wonderful yet. We must let go to grow in the ways we are meant to, and endings are an inescapable part of this process. As Kathryn Schulz reminds us, “the fundamental paradox of loss [is] that it never disappears.”

We can always be open to love after loss. Endings will bring us opportunities to birth something else; to create a version of life that our previous self wouldn’t have ever dreamed of. When one cycle closes, another commences.

May we keep loving and losing and loving again.

Maggie