The Bittersweet of Moving Forward  

Is moving forward a clean feeling for you?  

A new job, a new city, a new relationship, a new phase of life, it is supposed to feel like growth, opportunity, adventure. What we don’t talk about nearly enough is how often those feelings arrive tangled with their opposites as well. Excitement that sits beside anxiety or hope mixed with worry or a sense of freedom laced with sadness for what we are leaving behind. 

Is it messy because it is layered? Every step into something new is also a step away from something old. As much as it is about leaving places or people behind, it is also about parting with versions of ourselves. The you who belonged to that chapter with comfort in that routine and who knew how to navigate that world, quietly starts to fade as a new self begins to take shape. That transition alone can feel like both loss and gain, isn’t it? 

Our emotions, as part of being human, are wired for complexity, not neat boxes. You can love the idea of your next chapter and still ache for the one you have outgrown. You can feel relief at leaving a situation and still miss aspects of it. You can crave change and still be scared of what it demands.  

The danger is when we try to flatten this complexity. When we tell ourselves we should only feel happy about moving forward, we end up silencing or invalidating real parts of our experience. When we suppress the sadness or fear that naturally comes with change, those emotions don’t disappear; they might just resurface later as exhaustion, restlessness, or self-doubt. 

What if instead, we treated transition as a space to hold both? To give ourselves permission to grieve even as we celebrate. To honour the weight of what is now behind us without letting it chain us there. To admit that beginnings often carry echoes of endings and that this is not a flaw in us but the design of life itself. 

Can the real measure of moving forward not only be how smoothly we leave, but how honestly we carry both the excitement of what’s ahead and the tenderness for what came before? Going back to where we started, is it a clean feeling, is it supposed to be one note, or is it supposed to feel bittersweet? 

Maybe in the bittersweetness, there’s a strange kind of wholeness. You’re not abandoning your past or denying your future instead you are standing in the only place you truly can, the present, where both of these meet. 

Carrying the ache and spark of change? Share your bittersweet transition tales and submit to iDare. In the tangle, you're seen and whole. 

Image Credits: UnSplash