Objectively speaking, they are just boxes- assorted shapes and sizes, some plastic and some cardboard.

On the outside, they give no indication of what they contain. So it is not the boxes themselves which cause the dilemma, the thought spirals, but what’s inside them.

A playbill from a musical I didn’t want to see.

My very first business card.

A glass bottle of raspberry vinaigrette salad dressing: 3 years old, the seal unbroken.

Packing to leave for my next adventure meant rummaging through the remains of my last, finding objects and memories and feelings that had been boxed up since the day I left. These are the things I have been hiding from myself.

When you are a perfectionist, anything that doesn’t go according to plan becomes a failure. It’s a dichotomous variable that does not take into account the facts of a situation, like whether the choice had been the right one: whether the city and the job and the people had been good for you. Perceiving something as a failure doesn’t allow you to consider your health or how something made you feel.

The only question of importance in a mind that never accepts being wrong is this: Did I do what I set out to do?

And if there is even a hint of hesitation- then it becomes very clear that you have let yourself and everyone you love down. Logic has no place in this mindset, even if you consider yourself to be perfectly reasonable- because that reason is reserved for other things, other people, and therefore outside and beyond your control.

Even when you move on to a completely different life: new city, new job, almost new everything, you find that sense of failure spilling over into a life completely separate from the one you left behind. It’s there, in the back of your mind as you work on the eighth draft of a five-page paper. It’s there in the questions you ask your boyfriend, looking for reassurance in the most functional and loving relationship you have ever had. It’s there in those moments of panic when a meeting gets rescheduled or you misplace a document, screaming that if you messed that life up, then you’re going to mess this one up, too.

Perhaps the most difficult thing about this situation is that the only person keeping count, aware of every tiny thing you think of as a failure is you. How do you turn off the voice that says you are defined by a life that didn’t work out- that wasn’t yours? How do you keep her quiet as you forge a new path and try the things you may never have known you were good at if the perceived failure had never happened?

Life, unfortunately, doesn’t stop when one version of it ends so you can figure out what’s next. And you have to carry all these different versions that have ended with you, because each girl you were had to figure something out that may now, in hindsight, feel like the most obvious answers in the world: leave New York. Find a way to go back to school forever. Let somebody love you for exactly who you are.

The people we’ve been are burdens only in the way we carry them. We let memories and hypotheticals drag us down because we don’t know how to let them build us up. What do we stand to lose from embracing these past versions of ourselves and letting all of their mistakes empower us instead of frighten us? What do we stand to gain in the realization that, despite everything that you tell yourself went wrong- some past version of you had the courage to keep going, keep pushing into the future to give you the chance to be better today?

Allow the people you have been to become your support system. They are you and not you, for you can take the mistakes made and become something greater than the sum of all those trials and errors. They are not your enemy, for they are precisely what allows you to move forward: to fail smarter. To fail better. To not fail at all.

The thought spirals will continue, but they will become recognizable and manageable. Something you can name, and therefore, something you can work to tame.

And then one day, unprompted and seemingly out of nowhere, you’re walking down the street in a new city, using the skills and knowledge you acquired in all the lives you’ve left behind- and you feel it. The wind whipping on your face and a sense of curiosity, of wonder: unmarked by fear of failure. An invisible intuition gently pushing you in the direction you know you need to go. It’s something familiar, something you’d almost forgotten the word for, but not quite.

And it feels a lot like freedom.