How we let people go

Once again I feel a tad unsure about publishing this post... but here we go!

I have recently had yet another lesson in the art of letting things go. This post may seem melancholy, but I do not want you to feel sad; I want it to be a story of learning the art of letting go & the warning to guard your heart above all else & for everyone to realise that each time you lose something you once held so dear, it is making room for something even more wonderful to enter your life. 

 There is an underestimated art to something one wouldn't consider a skill. It determines the ultimate strength of leaving someone/something you couldn't want more while knowing what you had and what you had hoped for didn't actually exist. 

You’re wondering now, how do you do this? How do you manage to forget about something that had all the potential to be wonderful?

It’s difficult at first. You struggle to forget the inside jokes you had, the deep conversations, the dreams and plans you discussed. You can spend your days wishing you were with him. At one point in time, you saw him as someone who needed to be loved and you couldn't see him in any other way.

But he could. He pushed you away. He uttered cruel words (whether intentionally or unintentionally)  that scarred you. He told you he felt indifferent, he threw insults around like it was second nature, he called you “bro” and he treated you unfairly because he refused to fall in love, yet, you still couldn't back away because that seemingly fragile image of him was all you could think about. No matter how unhealthy he was for you and how entertaining it was for him to hurt you, you still couldn't forget him.

Your best friend warned you, your mind warned you but your heart lay stubborn until you read a text message that finally broke it. You stared at the words too much and annoying and you knew you couldn't continue like this. It was here when this imaginative image of the male that you believed him to be was shattered. He isn't who you thought he was and you can’t change that.

You can’t force people to love you. You can only accept that they will eventually live with the regret of pushing away someone who only wanted to love them.

Now you wait a while, you swallow your tongue and hold your breath because each day you get a little stronger, and you get braver. You come to acknowledge the lessons you've learned of unrequited desire. You understand now not to give your heart away so easily. You've come to realise that in order for people to leave your life you need to let them. The more often you allow this, the easier losing becomes.

Then comes the art of letting people go. Letting someone go — when it is a necessary act of self-preservation, something that has to come if you expect to move forward in life; I personally regard it as a kind of victory. You have successfully overcome an emotional trauma that once surrounded you like a fog. People will tell you, always with the best intentions, that one day you are going to wake up and realise that you are okay, and your life is not immediately over because they are no longer a part of it. And this is true, although this positive does not happen as quickly as we would like. Because it’s not as though you simply wake up one day and proclaim yourself fine, suddenly hearing birds chirp after months of only your own oppressive silence. You simply start to forget, feeling the acute pain of the loss less and less as each day goes on. There will come a day when you don’t care, but you won’t notice it, because you will have other things to think about. You will be busy with a new hobby, or job, or a new set of friends. 

But in order to let that pain go, in order to remove this person from the place of power they have occupied for so long, you must let everything go. Perhaps in a very distant future, you will be able to pick and choose the memories you want to keep, but for a very long time, one memory will always bleed into another. You cannot simply think about the time the two of you stayed up the entire night, talking about your childhood and your dreams and fears. Because when you allow yourself to think about that, it will remind you of them as a whole, and will lead into all of the terrible things that happened after that night — not the least of which being their eventual departure. They exist within us as whole people, stories with beginnings and endings, and in order to let go of them we cannot choose the things we want to isolate for nostalgia.

No matter how hard it is we have to stop caring what they would think if they saw us, stop worrying about running into them, stop obsessing over the things we could have done differently to make them stay. And that means letting go of everything they meant to us, proving to ourselves , that life can be just as good &just as beautiful, without them in it. When you realise, long after the fact, that you no longer care about someone — that what they are doing in life has no bearing on you, and vice versa — it feels very much like a small death. Who they were with you no longer exists, and you cannot even preserve it in your memory, for the sake of your own mental health.

Of course, you never really forget anyone, but you certainly release them. You stop allowing their history to have any meaning for you today. You let them change their haircut, let them move, let them fall in love again. And when you see this person you have let go, you realise that there is no reason to be sad. The person you knew exists somewhere, but you are separated by too much time and too many new experiences to reach them again.

After all, who is more worthy of losing than someone who never understood what they had until they lost you – a person so worthy of keeping.