The Things I No Longer Reach For.
On the peculiar business of outgrowing things we once thought we’d always love.
The other day, I arrived at the mall an hour before it opened.
There was a sale going on, and I had made it my personal mission to get there early enough to secure a few gifts for people I love and, naturally, replenish my own little stash of things I probably didn’t need but had already convinced myself I deserved.
The mall opened at ten. I was there at nine.
And since there was very little I could do about the sixty minutes standing between me and the things I intended to buy, I decided to get myself a quick fix.
Starbucks seemed like the obvious choice.
There was a time when going to Starbucks was practically second nature to me. I knew what I wanted before I even approached the counter. I had my usual order, my usual preferences, and the sort of confidence that comes with having ordered the same thing so many times that the possibility of disappointment no longer crossed my mind.
“One grande white chocolate mocha, sub oat, and a sausage roll, please.”
I know, not particularly adventurous.
When the barista called out my order, I was summoned by the name Belle.
For the record, I said Bella.
B-E-L-L-A.
Four letters. Nothing terribly complicated, I would like to believe.
But I have long accepted that getting your name spelled correctly at Starbucks is a rare achievement. Something akin to making it to the final round of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? You could give them all the letters, enunciate every syllable, and still walk away with an entirely different identity.
At least Belle was close enough. I’ve had worse.
I collected my order, found myself a seat, and prepared to enjoy what I thought would be a perfectly uneventful breakfast.
Now, before I continue, there is something you should know about me.
I love sausage rolls. Or, at least, I have always believed that I do.
And not just in the way that people say they love a particular pastry because it happens to taste good. My affection for sausage rolls has a rather specific history.
Starbucks was where I first tasted one.
I don’t remember the exact date or what I was wearing that day. I couldn’t tell you what the weather was like or whether I had somewhere important to be afterward. But I remember liking it enough that it eventually became one of my favorite things to order.
And once something becomes a favorite of mine, I have a tendency to look for it everywhere.
If I visit a café and see a sausage roll on the menu, there is a very good chance I will order it. It doesn’t matter if the establishment is known for something else entirely. If they have a sausage roll, I want to know what theirs tastes like.
I suppose it became my own little way of comparing places.
Some were better than others, of course. Had flakier pastries, more generous fillings, and some were so forgettable that I could barely remember eating them.
But I kept ordering them anyway.
There was something comforting about having a favorite. About knowing that wherever I went, there was at least one thing on the menu I would be inclined to choose.
For a long time, the Starbucks sausage roll remained the one I associated with that comfort.
Which is why what happened next caught me completely off guard.
I took a sip of my coffee first.
Perfectly fine. Familiar, sweet, and exactly what I had expected.
Then I took a bite of my sausage roll.
And immediately, something felt off.
It wasn’t unpleasant enough to warrant a complaint or ask for a replacement, but it was different enough to make me question what I remembered loving about it.
I took another bite.
There was something about the sausage itself that bothered me. The texture felt strange, and the taste was almost excessively processed. I know sausages are processed food to begin with, so perhaps this is an unfair criticism, but I couldn’t think of a better way to describe it.
It tasted more like a hot dog pretending to be a sausage.
And not a particularly convincing one.
The funny thing is, I still liked everything else.
The bread was fine. The cheese was good. Whatever spread or filling they had tucked inside still tasted pleasant enough.
It was just the sausage.
The very thing that was supposed to make the sausage roll a sausage roll.
I remember looking at it and wondering whether Starbucks had changed its recipe.
Were they using a different supplier?
Was this a new kind of sausage?
Had they quietly replaced the old one with something cheaper?
Or had it always tasted like this?
I tried to recall the last time I had eaten one, hoping my memory would provide some sort of reference. But the more I thought about it, the less certain I became.
I couldn’t remember the exact taste anymore.
Only that I used to love it.
And somehow, that distinction bothered me more than the pastry itself. Because somewhere between my second and third bite, I had a thought that seemed far too sentimental for something so ordinary.
I didn’t know I was capable of no longer wanting my favorite.
I sat with that thought for a while.
It was an odd thing to realize at nine in the morning, especially when I had originally intended to spend the hour drinking coffee and mentally preparing myself for a sale.
But there it was.
For years, I had considered sausage rolls one of my favorite things. It was a preference I had repeated often enough that it became part of how I understood myself.
I was someone who loved sausage rolls.
Simple.
Yet, sitting there with one in front of me, I realized that I no longer felt the same enthusiasm.
I hadn’t grown tired of it through repetition. I hadn’t consciously decided to stop liking it. I hadn’t discovered some extraordinary pastry that rendered all previous favorites obsolete.
I simply took a bite one morning and found myself wanting something different.
And I wondered when that had happened. Surely, I hadn’t changed in the few seconds between ordering and eating.
Whatever had shifted in me must have happened long before that morning.
I just hadn’t noticed.
Perhaps that is one of the strangest things about growing older.
We are not always present for our own becoming.
We witness the obvious changes, of course. We notice when our hair grows longer, when our clothes fit differently, when our birthdays begin arriving with a little more urgency than excitement.
We recognize the major events that divide our lives into chapters.
A graduation. A new job. A move to another country. A relationship beginning or ending. A loss we know will change us long before we understand how.
But there are other changes that happen so quietly we don’t recognize them until something familiar fails to feel familiar.
We revisit an old favorite song and discover that we no longer want to hear it on repeat.
We return to a restaurant we once adored and find ourselves more interested in trying somewhere new.
We open our closets and realize that the clothes we used to reach for without hesitation have spent months untouched.
And sometimes, we order a sausage roll that we have loved for years, only to discover that we no longer particularly enjoy eating it.
I wonder how many preferences we continue to claim simply because we haven’t had the opportunity to question them.
How many times do we say, I’ve always loved this, when what we really mean is, There was a time when I loved this very much.
Those are two different things.
And I think I am only beginning to understand the difference.
I have always been someone who attaches meaning to little things.
I remember details that other people might consider inconsequential. The way someone takes their coffee. The song playing during an otherwise forgettable afternoon. The particular words someone used in a conversation they have probably forgotten having.
I keep these things.
Sometimes literally, in photographs, screenshots, receipts, voice records, and objects that have no practical reason to remain in my possession.
Other times, I keep them somewhere in my head, where they accumulate into a private archive of people and places and all the versions of myself that have existed among them.
I suppose that is why the idea of outgrowing a favorite feels more complicated to me than it probably should.
Because I don’t just remember the things I loved. I remember who I was when I loved them.
And I think there is a part of me that believes continuing to love those things is a way of remaining connected to that person, to me.
Perhaps that is why I return to familiar places even when there are newer ones to discover.
Why I replay songs that remind me of particular seasons.
Why I occasionally find myself wanting something not because I genuinely want it now, but because I remember wanting it before.
There is a peculiar comfort in repetition.
It gives us the illusion that some things remain unchanged, even when everything else seems to be moving.
The same coffee.
The same pastry.
The same favorite song.
The same familiar person.
For a moment, we get to believe that we are still exactly who we used to be. But what happens when the familiar no longer comforts us?
What happens when we return to something we once loved and discover that the feeling is no longer there?
I think our first instinct is often to assume that something must have gone wrong.
That the recipe changed.
That the place lost its charm.
That the person became different.
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That is precisely what happened, but sometimes, nothing outside of us has changed at all.
We are simply arriving as someone new.
I find that possibility both beautiful and a little heartbreaking.
Beautiful because it means we are capable of changing in ways we never anticipated. Heartbreaking because it means even the things we love most are not guaranteed to remain our favorites.
I used to think that when something mattered enough to us, it would always matter in the same way. That the intensity of our affection was somehow proof of its permanence. But I have lived long enough to know that this isn’t necessarily true.
There are things I once wanted so badly that I couldn’t imagine a future in which I would stop wanting them.
Places I was convinced I would never want to leave.
Dreams I built entire versions of my future around.
People whose presence felt so essential that the thought of living without them seemed almost impossible.
And yet, life has a way of making room for desires we never knew we would have.
Sometimes, we leave the places we once begged to stay in.
Other times, the dreams we worked toward become less important than the lives we discover along the way.
And there are moments when we stop reaching for people we once thought we would spend forever trying to keep.
Not necessarily because they became less deserving of our love, but because something in us changed.
And I think that is the part I am still learning to accept.
That no longer wanting something does not automatically mean it was never worth wanting.
A favorite can stop being a favorite without becoming a mistake.
A person can have been important without needing to remain in our lives forever.
A place can have been home without being where we are meant to stay.
There is no need to rewrite the past simply because our feelings have changed in the present.
I loved sausage rolls.
I know I did.
The fact that I didn’t particularly enjoy one that morning does not make all the previous mornings any less real. And perhaps the same is true for everything else.
I wonder if we sometimes hold on to things because we are afraid of what letting go might say about us.
There is a certain comfort in being consistent.
We like knowing who we are. We like having answers to questions about ourselves.
What’s your favorite food?
What’s your favorite place?
What kind of person do you want to become?
Who do you love?
What do you want out of life?
We answer these questions as though we are filling out a permanent record.
As though the person answering today will be the same person answering ten years from now. But maybe our answers are only ever accurate for the season in which we give them.
Maybe we are allowed to change them.
We might not always need a dramatic reason.
I think about the girl who first tasted that sausage roll at Starbucks. I don’t remember much about her morning, but I know she found something she liked.
For years afterward, I carried that preference with me.
I ordered sausage rolls in other establishments because she had discovered one that made her happy.
In a small, almost ridiculous way, I had been honoring her choice for years.
But I am not entirely her anymore.
I have been to places she had not yet seen. I have met people she did not know existed. I have experienced things that would have surprised her, disappointed her, delighted her, and perhaps changed her understanding of what it means to be happy.
I have become someone with memories she did not have, fears she had not yet encountered, and hopes she had not yet learned to imagine.
It seems unreasonable, then, to expect that we would always want exactly the same things.
Even so, I think I have spent a considerable amount of time trying to preserve her.
As though changing my preferences would somehow mean abandoning her.
But maybe growing older does not require us to remain loyal to every version of ourselves.
Maybe we can honor who we were without insisting on remaining who we were.
The girl who first loved sausage rolls does not need me to keep ordering them forever. She only needs me to remember that they once made her happy.
There is something strangely reassuring about the possibility that our desires can change without our conscious participation.
Because if I can wake up one morning and discover that something I once loved no longer appeals to me, perhaps the same thing can happen to the things I am currently struggling to release.
Perhaps there will come a day when I no longer feel compelled to revisit certain memories.
When I no longer look for familiar faces in unfamiliar places.
When I stop measuring the present against a past that no longer exists.
I don’t mean that I hope to forget.
I have never been particularly good at forgetting, and I am not entirely sure I want to be.
There are people and moments I would like to remember for as long as I can, even if they no longer have a place in my everyday life. But I wonder whether remembering might eventually become different from longing.
Whether I might someday think of something I once desperately wanted and feel nothing more complicated than gratitude.
Whether I might recognize its importance without feeling the need to have it again.
I wonder if that’s what it means to outgrow something.
Not to erase it.
Not to convince ourselves that it was never good.
But to reach a point where the memory of wanting it is no longer mistaken for wanting it still.
I think there is a great deal of freedom in that distinction.
And… a little sadness, too.
Because there is a certain tenderness in realizing that even our most familiar desires belong to particular seasons of our lives.
We cannot always take them with us, but we can remember them kindly.
Eventually, I finished my coffee.
The sausage roll was still there, considerably less impressive than the one I had been remembering all those years. Didn’t even get to finish it.
I hadn’t arrived at some grand conclusion about life. I still didn’t know whether Starbucks had changed its recipe or whether my taste buds had simply developed different preferences.
And I suppose I never will, unless I become sufficiently invested in the matter to investigate the history of their sausage suppliers.
Which, knowing myself, isn’t entirely out of the question.
But for the moment, I decided to leave it alone.
The mall was about to open, and I had other things to do.
There were gifts to buy, shelves to inspect, and a sale I had arrived an hour early for.
So I gathered my things and went about my day.
I kept thinking about that small, unremarkable breakfast.
About how easily I had ordered something out of habit.
How confidently I had expected to enjoy it. About how strange it felt to discover that a preference I had carried for years might no longer belong to me.
I think we spend so much of our lives trying to become certain of who we are.
We collect our favorites, establish our routines, and build little identities around the things that make us happy.
And then life happens.
We go places. We meet people. We lose things. We learn things. We become acquainted with versions of ourselves we never anticipated meeting.
Somewhere along the way, our tastes begin to change.
Sometimes, so quietly that the only evidence is an ordinary morning and a pastry that no longer tastes the way we remember.
I used to think that growing older meant becoming increasingly certain of myself.
Now, I wonder if it means becoming more comfortable with the possibility that I will keep changing.
That I will have new favorites.
That I will discover new comforts.
That I will eventually stop wanting some of the things I currently believe I will always want.
And that none of this needs to diminish the sincerity with which I once loved them.
Maybe I will order another sausage roll someday.
I might even find one that reminds me exactly why I fell in love with them in the first place.
Or I could discover something entirely different and spend the next several years ordering it from every café that happens to have it on the menu.
I like to think that possibility would have delighted the younger version of me.
After all, she was the one who taught me to be curious about the things I might love.
That is what I want to carry forward.
Not so much the favorites themselves, but the openness to discovering new ones.
I am beginning to understand that no longer wanting something does not mean I was wrong to have loved it. It only means that the person I am today is allowed to want something different.
Somewhere between all the things I have loved and all the things I have yet to discover, there is a version of me who will finally understand that change does not always have to feel like losing.
It‘s just simply making room.
For another favorite.
Another season.
Another self.
And off to the sale I go.
