Evolution is a new beginning too

Every beginning, they say is a journey to a new adventure worth it. However, no one ever told me that I would have to let go of some things from the past that could cost me preciously.
This time, into a tedious journey of battle, recovery and healing, I am losing, perhaps have already lost a few gems in the form of people. As I travelled not across places but emotions, I was dropping the gems from my sack all along the exhausting hike. When I finally reached a destination where I could stand and breathe fresh air, I had only a few of them left. I am now at this cross road, where one side there is a path I came through and the other, a path towards a future that I don’t know of.
People may come people may go but not the emotions they leave us with. As I started experiencing clinical depression and anxiety, along with extreme anger and irritation, I was becoming a sapling stuck amidst thorns. As soft and vulnerable as a sapling crying out for help to be nourished but covered with pricky thorns and stems allowing no one to come closer. Anger during depression was taking me on a cycle tour of guilt, misery and rage, thus losing hope in people and then people themselves, only after I had lost myself.
Today, I wonder now what a new beginning is when I am still carrying the emotions from the past. The path I walk now might be a new path, a new beginning but not when my emotions are still embedded with the past experiences. Forgetting selective emotions and people from my past is not my flair. I am human and unless you convert my mind into your electric device, it is not going to erase the past in a swish. Days, months and even if years pass, parts of the emotions people and moments have left with me will stay. What is a new beginning then?
At one point hearing several people, blog posts and motivational quotes asking me to forget the past and move on had started to make a reverse impact from what was expected. I was starting to experience pressure to forget persons who till date make me feel loved and valuable despite not being around physically. I know this is hard to understand. Let me explain this a bit. Imagine being friends with someone for a good number of years without having exchanged anything but love and support for each other. One fine day, you realize that the friendship is no longer as warm as it had been. Your friend had to leave because she couldn’t handle your extremes that arouse due to a mental illness. She is after all not a demon or not a bad person. She is only a human that couldn’t carry weight of the burden you lay upon her.
Forgetting people who at point in my life have been pillars of support and have positively influenced my life would be to forget that the past has been beautiful too. You may be wondering what about the negative past then? You are still clinging on it? This part of the past when carried along into the present and then into the future can be hard but it is even harder if I convince myself not to think of it. What I wish for is when I one day bump into my lost friends or happen to find an old happy photo of me with them that I lost to depression, I would not want it to come back to me like a tsunami wave that I didn’t not expect tossing me and throwing me away from the ground I was standing on. Instead I wish to smile and speak a few words of gratitude. My emotions and soul evolve into new beginnings. Beautiful people stay even after they’ve left.