We return to old friendships and revisit places and ambitions, expecting to feel the same. When we don’t, we assume something is missing. In reality, something has simply changed “us”, and we haven’t caught up to ourselves yet.

MUEEN WALEE MAHEER

We all have a locked chest existing in a half-physical, half-unnamed place. Inside it remains fragments of a self that had hoped to exist but never fully did. The dream of walking down the corridor of that institution. A gift from someone who hurt you, someone you once couldn’t imagine a day without. Inside jokes that no longer belong to anyone. Certificates from goals you no longer care about.

They just stay. Untouched, unresolved, solemnly waiting.

And yet the moment someone suggests letting them go, something within us tightens. A resistance rises, disproportionate but undeniable.

The easy explanation is sunk cost: you’ve invested time, emotion, and years, so abandoning it feels like a waste. But sunk cost explains bad investments, not heartbreak. It explains why you might finish an overpriced, disappointing meal, but not why you still catch yourself daydreaming about someone you’ve sworn you’ve moved on from.

The real reason runs deeper than economics. It runs straight into identity.

These things persist not because they still belong in your life, but because they’ve been absorbed into who you are. Like artefacts in a backroom archive, they’re no longer part of the story unfolding. But they still take part in the story being told. We don’t hold onto things. We hold onto who we were when they made sense. And as long as we hold onto that person, we cannot fully become the next one.

Jay Gatsby is the clearest proof of this. We think he loves Daisy Buchanan — but that’s not quite right. What he loves is the person he became while loving her: the man with a green light across the water and a reason to reach for it. Five years of rebuilding himself into someone worthy of her is really just one long attempt to resurrect a self that he’s already lost. And by the time he finds Daisy again, that self is gone. The tragedy of Gatsby isn’t that he can’t have her. It’s that the version of him who wanted her no longer exists, and he never noticed.

We do this too, just more unobtrusively. We return to old friendships and revisit places and ambitions, expecting to feel the same. When we don’t, we assume something is missing. In reality, something has simply changed “us”, and we haven’t caught up to ourselves yet.

The opposite error is just as damaging.

Raskolnikov, in Crime and Punishment , convinces himself that shedding his conscience will elevate him beyond ordinary men. The murder isn’t just a crime; it’s an experiment in self-reinvention. He lets go of the one thing he believed was holding him back, and it destroys him completely.

He treats his conscience like a heavy winter coat, something which can be shrugged off to move faster. He realised too late that it was his skin, not his garment. What follows isn’t divine punishment. It’s the raw shock of a body that has flayed itself alive in the name of freedom.

This is what forced letting go actually looks like. Deleting every photo. Cutting off entire friend groups. Becoming someone new overnight. It feels like control. More often, it’s just running away from something you never actually resolved.

So, if desperate clinging hollows you out and violent discarding breaks you, what does genuine release look like?

Marcus Aurelius didn’t say “move on”. He said something more precise: you cannot control what happens to you, only your relationship to it. Amor fati , love of fate, is not resignation. It is refusing to make peace conditional on recovering something already lost.

Consider the student who spent years preparing for a future they thought they wanted or were told to want. When it doesn’t happen, the grief is real. Not just for the outcome, but also for the version of themselves that had already been imagined, already made real in someone else’s expectations.

Amor fati asks something difficult: grieve what was real, honour the effort that was yours, and then cease making your happiness dependent on a future that no longer exists. You have to let it go.

The self is not a sculpture that cracks when chipped; rather, it’s a river, always moving, always reshaping itself around new ground. The chest remains a vessel for the version of yourself you once were. Clearing it is not betrayal. It is simply making room for the person you have, without quite realising it, already become.

Mueen Walee Maheer is an aspiring polymath who is currently a master of none but a fan of many. Send him a new obsession at mueenwaleemaheer@gmail.com