It really is vital to take the time to grieve your dead dreams, hopes and illusions. Those deaths, while far more abstract than the actual death of a loved one, are no less real. In some sense, they are even more real, as they are the parts of ourselves we need to say goodbye to, and let go of, in order to properly move on. If we don’t, then we carry those invisible corpses with us wherever we go, slowing us down, making us bitter, resentful and sad.
I’ve been thinking of this in the context of old social media accounts. I have an old centralized account that I don’t post on anymore. But it’s there, and I sometimes scroll through it. And I think about deleting it, but I worry about losing those “connections”.
But many of those relationships represent an old era of my life, with old goals, old dreams.
In many cases, I have mourned those dreams, but the ghosts of them linger in every scroll of that old friend group.
I think to truly grow into the new, I need to delete it. There’s a few people I’d keep in touch with, but there’s no need to see those faces anymore. To relive that era indefinitely would only stifle me.
