This can be enormously difficult - often because the next unspoken bit is “moving on.” To what, to where, to whom?
There’s a part of you that doesn’t want to move on. The reasons will vary from one person to another but at some level it’s difficult to imagine what life will be like and when you do imagine it, it somehow seems bleak and empty compared with what has gone before.
To some the very idea can seem like a betrayal.
The piece in the Good Read titled, “On Being Stuck,” was written after I’d met someone who twelve months after suffering an enormous loss hadn’t moved an inch, despite returning to work and trying to put on the appearance of someone who was getting on with their life. The emotional burden they were carrying was just too great. Twenty years on I met that person again and their life has moved on and they are living life to the full.
Sometimes people get stuck when they’re disappointed in their ambition. I’m not sure just where we derive resilience from but my guess it’s, like so many things, pretty early on in life - hence the Russian dolls on the shelf in my office.
Some people get stuck looking back on a relationship and go over it like an old kipper, finding something else to blame themselves for. In all these scenarios the task is rarely to imagine a rosy future - that’s usually too big an ask, it’s more to get someone who is stuck looking backwards to simply to shift their attention into right now. Only once they’ve achieved that can they start on the future.
