So you know how people sometimes tell you to move on? Or not to dwell on the past? Or best yet to “just get over it”? That’s so fucking dumb.

First off, there’s trauma which means you can’t just let stuff go because it’s had a significant impact on your brain. And usually if you explained to someone that you were badly fucked up by something traumatic, those people wouldn’t be rudely telling you to forget about it, they’d be apologetically dripping with false sympathy. Or real sympathy. But it would be annoying either way.

Second off, even if something isn’t quite “trauma”, it can still be really hurtful. It can be a pivotal experience in your life that affected how you developed or became the person you are today. For better and for worse, there are incidents that shape us and is it really so wrong to stay focused on those moments?

Who is to decide which experiences we choose to focus on and which ones we forget about? When people tell us to “get over it” should we forget positive experiences too? Just get over all the moments that made us happy, sad, angry, and more? What about creating our personal identity? We have to base our self-concept off of some memories, somehow, and they might as well be the important ones even if they are sometimes negative.

Now someone is going to feel the need to point out that it’s not ALL negative memories you should move on from. No, it’s just the ones that they find annoying for you to be hyper-focused on. Because where do you draw the line? Doesn’t everyone get to decide which memories are important to them even if they are painful or bothersome for other people to be reminded of? Not to mention maybe the reason you can’t move on about something is because it still has a meaning for you that you haven’t deciphered yet.

So go ahead and stay mired in the muck of your depressed thoughts. Be obsessive, be stuck. Because you get to decide which experiences and memories are worth dwelling on, and you get to decide when you truly feel something is holding you back. When you’re ready to move on, you’ll be all the better for having given yourself the space to think through what was having an impact on you in the first place. And maybe you’ll never move forward to the imaginary better that society has tried to sell you on. It’s going to be your personal journey, so you determine your destination, your path, and your pace.