“I Feel Like Everyone Else Has Moved On, and I’m Still Stuck in a Memory”
“People around me seem fine—like they’ve accepted things, adapted, started new chapters. But I still feel caught in the past. A part of me is frozen in a moment that meant something, that hurt deeply, that I haven’t made peace with. I don’t want to stay here, but I also can’t seem to leave. It’s like I’m grieving something everyone else forgot.”
Dear Micah,
There’s something especially lonely about grieving after the world has moved on. When your inner world is still echoing with a moment long past, while everyone else is laughing, building, or forgetting—that’s a kind of ghosting no one talks about. Not the loss of a person or place, but the loss of shared meaning. The moment still lives in you, but no one else is looking back.
What you’re describing isn’t failure. It’s the nature of grief that’s deeply attached to memory. Some moments imprint on us. They don’t ask permission. They just settle into the body, into the nervous system, into the emotional landscape where time gets warped. And even as the calendar changes and people around you adapt, you’re still in dialogue with that memory. Still trying to understand it. Still holding something that never quite got named, resolved, or witnessed.
People love forward motion. They love clean arcs and resolution. They don’t always know what to do with someone whose soul is still catching up. But memory doesn’t move on a schedule. It doesn’t care if everyone else has shifted to the next plot point. It loops, it lingers, it returns when you least expect it. And sometimes, we’re not stuck—we’re just mid-process. Still metabolizing something that once mattered deeply. Or still matters.
This can be especially true when the memory was layered: part joy, part pain, part identity. Maybe it was a relationship, a season of life, a version of yourself that felt more vivid, more connected, more whole. Or maybe it was the moment everything changed. Sometimes it’s not the memory itself we’re stuck in, but the version of ourselves that lived there—the one who still needs care, or closure, or permission to let go.
You’re not wrong for still being there. You’re not wrong for remembering what others have forgotten. But you don’t have to live only there. The past isn’t asking you to stay—it’s asking to be integrated. To be held gently, instead of avoided or overwritten. When we allow memory to be part of us, instead of a trap, it softens. It still stings sometimes. But it loses its grip.
You don’t need to force yourself into the speed of others. Let your timeline be slow. Let your memory breathe. The pace of healing isn’t dictated by consensus. And the fact that you still feel means you haven’t numbed yourself to life.
That’s not being behind. That’s being alive.
Still here with you.
–RJ