Losing a loved one, a friend, or even watching a version of yourself fade away—we’ve all been blindsided by memories and experienced periods of vulnerability. I’ve found many of these experiences accurately articulated in The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, who elucidates thoughts that we struggle to put into words, allowing us to understand the mourning and grief over loved ones suddenly taken from our lives. 

Didion, who writes about the year after her husband’s death, in which she tended to her comatose only child, describes “the vortex effect”: how the tiniest things in life triggered memories of her husband and sent her down a spiraling path of grief, and what she did to prevent such a thing from happening to her. 

During the summer, I drove through the town in New Hampshire where I grew up; I saw the private school, with its fancy log cabin and pool, that I had attended summer camp every year; the path that my grandfather and I took each day to school, where I had met my best friend. The place felt achingly different, yet the same. My school, the roads, the public playgrounds—nothing had changed. The only things that changed were the for sale sign hammered into our lawn, the fact that I could no longer spend all day with my neighbors on the trampoline in their backyard, and that my childhood best friend’s dog was no longer there to scare me. 

That night, I finally understood the interest people have in time machines. I wanted to take myself back to a time when stress from school and the phrase “maturing” did not exist in my vocabulary.

After reading Didion’s book, I started to accept that however hard it is, we must all move on in life eventually—“As it was in the beginning, it is now and ever shall be, world without end,” (Didion 222)—the world doesn’t wait for you.

Whenever you feel like giving up, remember that it’s okay to be lost and it’s human to feel as if we’ve reached our lowest point in life. Take it from the words of Didion: “We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so weird that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”

Moving on, painful in its nature, is a part of being human. Take time after class to go out with friends, binge-watch that show you’ve been talking about, eat the pint of Ben and Jerry’s you’ve been craving, sit in the bathtub and cry until the sadness has washed away. It’s okay to mourn, to grieve, to find time to process emotions, to dedicate time to yourself. After all, we are all only mortal. 

Whether you’re grieving a loved one, starting a new chapter in life, or learning to move on, know that you aren’t alone.