The Things That Have Finished Teaching Us

There are things we keep long after they have finished teaching us.

Ways of being.
Ways of surviving.
Ways of making ourselves welcome.

They weren't mistakes.

Some of them were brilliant.

They got us here.

But usefulness can become an identity.
Strength can become a job.
Independence can become a refusal to be held.
Understanding can become a way of never simply being.

And sometimes the next thing isn't another lesson.

It's compost.

Keep the wisdom.
Drop the weight.

Let what once protected you break down into something that feeds you.

You don't have to destroy the old version of yourself.

You don't even have to dislike her.

She can simply be finished.

And perhaps that is one kind of forgetting: not losing what you know,
but no longer needing to remember who you had to be.