“The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.”
James Taylor,
Secret o’ Life
Welcome to the modern world, where you can get nearly anything you want at an instant. If you’re hungry, you can order food on your phone or drive by a fast food joint. If you’re bored, you can turn on Netflix or scroll through endless streams of content on your social media feed. If you need a quick solution at work you can just Google or hop onto ChatGPT for ideas.
With that being said, it’s no surprise how difficult it for us to put our faith into any kind of process. And whether we like it or not, the best things in life come with process.
We like to romanticize the idea that growth happens instantaneously. We just love narrating our life like it’s a movie, and crediting our growth to one pivotal moment that changed everything — how our life took a complete turn after reading one book, or falling in love with our partner at first sight, or even going to therapy.
But in reality, the truth is often much more boring. Real growth tends to happen at a gradual and subtle pace, that you almost don’t notice it until a certain point.
You just have to consistently put in the work, and let time do its thing.
It’s like investing. You put in a sum of money consistently, and you leave it to the wonders of compound interest. It doesn’t seem like much is happening in the short term, but with time, your wealth grows significantly almost without you realizing.
And when it comes to healing your wounds, the same principle applies. Time does “heal all wounds”, as we like to say, but not unless you also put in the work to heal.
Two years ago, I committed to about seven months of weekly therapy, after struggling with deep depression for three years. I went through the slow process of painfully peeling back the many overlapping layers of trauma and grief that had been eating away in me for so long.
But I wouldn’t say that I felt significantly better during or immediately after those months. When I really think about it, I’d say that it took many more months after that, or most of last year, to really process what I had worked through.
A lot of times, I didn’t notice the changes in myself, until other people pointed them out, saying things like, “You look healthier now,” and “You’ve been happier lately.” One friend that I hadn’t seen in years even commented on my weight gain, “You used to be so goddamned skinny. But now you look bulkier. You have boobs now.” I sure hope he was exaggerating.
When I did notice these changes in myself, I was actually surprised by how ordinary and almost inconspicuous they felt. They were in stark contrast to the grandiose ideas I had of growth or healing.
“Healing” for me was realizing that for quite a while, I hadn’t been caught up as much on thoughts that used to be highly intrusive and anxiety-provoking. It was being single and being okay with it. It was driving alone in my car, and actually enjoying my own company. It was the feeling that I was loving my life again, and that I had a future to look forward to.
This isn’t to say that my life is so great now. Far from it. Like anybody else, I still have plenty of problems that I need to work through. And I still experience depressive episodes every now and then. But I can honestly say that my worst nowadays is incomparably better than my best from years ago.
If you’re reading this and you feel like your life is over, it isn’t. Just keep moving forward. Every step counts, no matter how small.
When you’re so entrenched in your pain, I know it’s hard to imagine that down the road, things will get better. And I’m not going to lie — it may even take you many years to get to that place. But you will get there, I promise.
Time is on your side, if you let it be. All of us are scared of growing old, even though it’s happening to us every day. But with growing old comes with a lot of clarity. With every passing day, it gets more doable to put the past behind you. To realize that you are a completely different person today than when you were, say, in your early 20s. To forgive yourself for handling your life in the only ways that you knew at the time.
With every passing day, you get to realize that your time is running out. So you’d might as well use the time you have now to focus on what matters, and let go of what doesn’t.
Izzat Zailan 