Tomorrow Will Still Come

"Life goes on."
I had heard that statement so many times in my life that it became meaningless. Like, yeah of course life goes on, what else would it do? When I was faced with a problem, no matter how trivial, and someone would tell me “well, life goes on” I would immediately fill up with venom and be unable to make eye contact for at least five minutes.

It felt like I was being told that what I was going through and feeling was invalid. It felt like someone was saying “Oh big deal, get over it.” And yes, sometimes when people say “life goes on,” that’s exactly what they mean. They mean, “stop crying over a TV show getting cancelled, it’s pathetic”. They mean, “oh too bad you didn’t get that last piece of pizza, but whatever.” (And yes, I am speaking from experience).

But more often than not, what they really mean is that life continues on, whether you like it or not. Just because something doesn’t go your way doesn’t mean the world is going to stop and wait for you to feel better about things. The real world isn’t a movie, you can’t press pause after a dramatic moment to let it sink in.


And life goes on even when it feels like it should stop. There have been moments in my life when I really did not believe that life could go on.

This past fall one of my high school friends passed away. Before I lost Dylan I had never lost anyone. No one close to me had passed, and I had never experienced the total and utter shock of realizing that people actually do die and you never see them again. Death was one of those things that happened in movies, in TV shows, or to people I had never known before, but never did I really ever imagine or understand what it was like to lose someone.

For a while I couldn’t process the fact that life was going forward. I remember sitting at the funeral and not being able to understand that my college friends were sitting in a classroom at that same moment, their lives still completely normal. I couldn’t understand that while I was in my hometown mourning with my old friends one of my best friends at UVM was having a birthday party. It didn’t make sense to me that life was still moving, that I would wake up the next day, with everything so different but everything going on just the same.

Pain and grief are valid emotions. Pain can numb you into nonexistence; it can sear through your daily life and make the smallest of tasks unbearable. Pain can ebb and fade but it never truly heals. Yet somehow we keep living.

I returned to school and my job and my theatre productions. From the outside my life was going on, but I still couldn’t understand what I was doing. I went through the motions everyday, not understanding how life was still happening all around me. But life kept moving and eventually I did too.

So now when something happens to me that I don’t know how to handle, I just remind myself that life keeps going. Even if right now I don’t know how I will make it to tomorrow, I know that tomorrow will still come. Healing will come; a solution to my problems will come.

In writing this I am not telling you to simply get over something. I am not discrediting whatever you are going through. You must allow yourself to grieve, to stress, to feel, but you must allow that to pass. You must let your life go on. When I hear “life goes on” I hear a reminder that even when I can’t see it, things will get better. That though I may not know the route, eventually I will find my way. There is always a tomorrow, whether we’re ready or not.

“When the pretty birds have flown,
And you feel hurt and alone,
Be strong and carry on,
And remember that life goes on.”
― Mouloud Benzadi