Stop Trying To Forget Them—It’s Not Going To Work

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I can’t count the amount of effort and time many people around me and I have been wasting trying to forget someone. We try to forget moments, feelings, and memories we experienced with them; however, we fail to forget every single time, despite all our attempts. So to everyone out there who’s trying to forget someone right now, quit trying, because it’s impossible to do so. I know that this is not what you want to hear. I know that saying this aloud may make many people uncomfortable, and many people may not like hearing this, but this is the truth. No matter how much you try to forget someone, you’ll never be able to.

When we want to move on or let go of someone, the first thing we think of is forgetting them, but let’s be realistic here—we can’t really do that. So this is me saving you a lot of failing attempts and a lot of time being wasted on trying to do the impossible. This is not how we were created; we just don’t forget easily, especially the things and the people that have touched us deeply. We can’t just erase someone from our memory, because even if we remember things less vividly over time, we would still remember them. So how does one let go, then, if they don’t forget?

Letting go of the idea of forgetting them is the very first step towards taking the right road toward moving on. Because all this time, your efforts were invested in walking a dead-end road. But channeling your energy to find a way to heal and let go without trying to erase them from your mind is what will truly help you during a journey like this.

You learn to move on while remembering everything. That’s the challenge, actually. When you ask people, they will tell you that this seemed impossible at first because the memory was so fresh, but I think they will also tell you that with time, new experiences, and new people entering their lives, things change. They learn to live like this better.

Eventually, you realize that you have to cope with such memories, not by extracting them but by learning how to move on with your life with all of them inside of you. That’s actually how you heal from so many things in life. You don’t try to undo them or make them not exist, but you let them be and learn how to deal with them being there anyway. Whether what you are trying to forget is heartbreak or trauma or an incident in your life that you wish never happened, whatever it is you want to heal from, you need to know that the very first step of doing so is not by forgetting it.