II. The things you love now are not permanent saviors.

“Moving to California saved my life.”

“Becoming a runner saved my life.”

“This band—I love them! Like, you know they saved my life, right? They totally saved my life when I was 13!”

When I’ve said things like this, and meant them, there was no actual life at stake. But there were times these claims felt very true, at least in regard to resisting some psychic death. These so-called lifesavers really are markers in my timeline of something that moved right in just when I needed it; they were gestures of right-place, right-time righteousness that helped me out from going through an unraveling or a depression or an emotional loss. I have love for the things that have saved me in moments of shiftiness and confusion, when I needed a guide and a marker. That’s why the grief feels like a breakup when you move on from them.

It hurts to learn that just because something saved you once, doesn’t mean it’s capable of or destined to save it forever. By saving, I mean it either gave you a reason to survive in a hard moment, or a reason to thrive in an easier one. Sometimes you revisit that place or that album or that religion or whatever it was, and realize that it’s not the appropriate survival tool for your moment anymore. It no longer fits. It might be comforting to know that it’s still there, but the conditions have changed, and you need new apparatuses.

Is there anything more heart-wrenching than a break up with a thing you love? Not a person, but a passion, a place, something that was once so important to you but no longer holds the same relevance to the things you’re going through, or just doesn’t seem to align with the person you’ve become since discovering it. Your needs are different now, and it just doesn’t work the same way. That’s disorienting, that fizzling out of die-hard appreciation for something that has given you so much when it was most needed. You’re not crazy for feeling like your favorite book betrayed you when the themes no longer suit your philosophies, or feeling like the place you moved to and were so happy in now wants to file for divorce.

I have been brokenhearted by the phasing out of my passions, as I was figuring out that they would never contain the full curriculum for surviving all of life; that a work of art that I worshipped, or a sport I loved to play where I found metaphors for self-discovery, or a social scenario where I had tumbled upon the most exciting ways to live up until that point were not going to carry me all the way through. They were just moments, and they no longer suited me. Their techniques for breathing life into emotional areas in which I felt a little dead just don’t work anymore. This is basically the “kill your idols” realization of the things-sphere. Remember what I said before about tiny deaths in your own personal universe? This can feel like a dozen worlds imploding at once.

To survive this, we gotta break it down. Was it that thing really? Was it the book? That youth group? That sports team or that band? Or was it your ability to discover them in the first place, and to find what you needed most from what it could offer you? Was it the resourcefulness of your scrappy soul to discover a minor redemption inside something you could love?

The salvation feeling is all due to your ability to discover and find what you needed, whatever that was. It’s important to let what those discoveries are evolve. It’s just as important to realize that it wasn’t that thing that saved your life! It was what you found in it, what spoke to you through it, that did the life-affirming heavy lifting there. That means that things are ephemeral, no matter how hard you try to preserve them. Passions will come and go and die and decompose and evaporate into irrelevance, which, OK, ouch. But it means that you have it within you to go through life and uncover gifts, like Easter eggs set out for you, in the art and the activities and experiences the that you choose to engage with throughout life. The hardest round is the first round, when you notice your tastes, and what you need out of that kind of adoration, change for the first time. You’re going to grow up and, just like your relationships to people, you’ll need to let go of some old friends and find new ones as you change, too.