This Is Me Letting You Go

by Heidi Priebe

Just because someone is not around to appreciate the complexities of who you are does not mean that you deserve anything less than pure joy.

Who you are doesn’t cease to exist because there’s nobody there to admire it.

Don’t forget about what makes you incredible. Don’t let your own intricacies slide. Because the loveable parts of you are not gone – I absolutely promise you that much.

Timing is a bitch, yes. But it’s only a bitch if we let it be. Here’s a simple truth that I think we all need to face up to: the people we meet at the wrong time are actually just the wrong people. You never meet the right people at the wrong time because the right people are timeless.

Because here’s what we don’t want to admit about love: it is a crutch that we use all the time. The idea that someday somebody will love all our flaws is a subtle excuse not to work on them. The principle of two halves making a whole restrains us from becoming our own better half. We want someone to swoop in during our darkest hour and save us, but what if we knew they never would? We’d have to start doing everything differently.

If there’s one thing we all need to stop doing, it’s waiting around for someone else to show up and change our lives.

We have to start appreciating all that we bring to our own lives. Because the ironic truth is, you are most attractive when you’re not worried about who you’re attracting. When you’re living your life confidently, freely and without restraint, you emit the kind of energy that it just isn’t possible to fake. The kind of energy that’s capable of transforming not just your own life, but the lives of people around you.

I know you long to be told that you do not have to tone yourself down to a smaller, frailer, more helpless version of yourself in order to be loved. You just have to wait a little longer, run a little further, come across that great love a little bit differently. You are the flame, not the moth. And your job is to burn with conviction.

You should be able to be with somebody you love and also live a life that entices, invigorates and inspires you. You should be able to pursue what you want out of this world in every fearless way you want to without running the risk of losing the person you value most. You should be able to have, at the bare minimum, a relationship that allows for growth and exploration on the part of both parties.

Here’s the stark truth about the person who is right for you: They want the same lifestyle that you do. How do I know this? Because that is, by definition, what makes them right for you. To be with someone whose eyes light up when yours do, whose heart races when your blood also pounds, who is enticed and inspired by the same forces that drive you forward, is a gift many of us never truly get to experience.

We owe it to ourselves to live the greatest life that we’re capable of living, even if that means that we have to be alone for a very long time.

Because the truth is, you never really did fall in love with them. You fell in love with their potential. You fell in love with the maybes and the could-have-beens. You fell in love with all the trips you didn’t take, the plans you didn’t make, the hazy, unintelligible future that stretched out before you without any opportunity to build upon. You fell in love with the potential of what could have happened had you been the kind of person who’d stayed. Had you been the person who could fall in love fully, without pause. You realize that you didn’t fall in love with them at all, but that you could have. That you might have. That there may always be a small part of yourself that is going to wonder ‘what if’ and that maybe you like it that way.

Because here’s something we all loathe to admit – none of us are inspired every day. We all get exhausted. We all get discouraged. And we’re allowed to work on through those feelings. Just because you’re beaten down and worn out and sick of the life that you’re living doesn’t mean you’re not making a change. Every person you have ever admired has had times where they felt utterly defeated in the pursuit of their dreams. But that didn’t prevent them from reaching them. You’re allowed to stumble slowly towards your biggest transformations. It doesn’t always have to be a blazing, flagrant affair.

When you’re tired, go slowly. Go quietly. Go timidly. But do not stop. You are tired for all the right reasons. You are tired because you’re supposed to be. You’re tired because you’re making a change. You are exhausted for all the right reasons and it’s only an indication to go on. You are tired because you’re growing. And someday that growth will give way to the exact rejuvenation that you need.

You love yourself first. Not necessarily most or best, but first. You don’t cancel plans that you were excited about because somebody else wanted your time. You don’t rearrange your schedule to accommodate a person who may bail at the last moment anyway. You are strict with yourself – even when you want to give in to the impulses of others –because you know that what you want and what you need is not always the same thing.

To love without expectation, you learn what’s not in your control. You understand that everyone has their own demons and nobody owes it to you to fight them. At the end of the day, you have two choices in love – one is to accept someone just as they are and the other is to walk away. There is no in between. There is no bartering, bargaining, expecting and falling short in love. There is just choosing to be there or to not. Anything in between is a tired, self-interested excuse for love.

And if you can do that for yourself – if you can live up to your own expectations and desires, then the need for other people to do so disappears. The need to bend over backwards, to accommodate others, to seek validation from those who do not deserve your heart, disappears. Who to love and who to leave becomes simple. And expectation slides out the window.

The truth about anger is that it’s nothing more than the refusal to heal, because you’re scared to. Because you’re afraid of who you’ll be once your wounds close up and you have to go on living in your new, unfamiliar skin. You want your old skin back. And so anger tells you to keep that wound bleeding.

Forgiveness means giving up hope for a different past. It means knowing that the past is over, the dust has settled and the destruction left in its wake can never be reconstructed to resemble what it was. It’s accepting that there’s no magic solution to the damage that’s been caused. It’s the realization that as unfair as the hurricane was, you still have to live in its city of ruins. And no amount of anger is going to reconstruct that city. You have to do it yourself. Forgiveness means accepting responsibility – not for causing the destruction, but for cleaning it up. It’s the decision that restoring your own peace is finally a bigger priority than disrupting someone else’s.

Forgiveness means saying that you’re not going to let what happened to you define you any longer. Forgiveness doesn’t mean that you are giving up all of your power. Forgiveness means you’re finally ready to take it back.

Because here’s the harsh truth about failure: It’s not always going to be pretty. It’s not always going to be endearing. Failure isn’t always going to be a product of external circumstances wreaking havoc – sometimes it will be entirely a product of our own unmoderated judgement. The situations we manipulated carelessly. The hearts we were clumsy and rough with. The things that we risked and then lost. The failures that are hardest to recover from are the ones that we walked into willingly and selfishly, thinking they’d lead us somewhere better. They are the failures that kick us off our own team.

Some failures aren’t about bouncing right back up and giving it another go. Some failures are about genuine change. Intensive self-reflection. And coming to the deep understanding that you can’t go on living the way you have been.

13. Whatever you still are not ready for Every fear that is holding you back right now. Every leap of faith you haven’t yet made. Every story you’re telling yourself about where you ought to be by the age that you’re currently at. We’re all a little not ready for life. We’re all a little bit timid. We’re all a little bit gun-shy and we’re all trying in whatever small ways we know how. Give yourself the time you need to grow. It’s going to happen, just not on the timeline you think it will.

You need to be alone when you’re not ready. When you meet someone who’s patient and kind and well meaning and yet some part of you is holding back. You have to know that it is no one else’s job to break down the walls that you’ve built up – that is a fortress of your own responsibility.

It is hard to get over a cheater because the real person we have to forgive at the end of the day is ourselves. We have to forgive ourselves for missing the signs that we couldn’t possibly have seen. For losing a game we never signed up to play. For having a perfectly natural connection with a person who turned out to not be who they said they were. We don’t want to accept that bad things can happen to us without precedence. That we can be fooled and treated unfairly and still end up the loser in the end. We want to believe in the eternal balance of the Universe, which suggests that when we are in pain we have done something wrong. It is hard to get over a cheater because it means accepting the bizarre notion that life can be unfair in the harshest sense of the word.

Take a chance on me, even though I cannot promise it will be worth it. I have no guarantees, no crystal ball, no vision of the future where we’re happy and healthy and together for the rest of our days. I have been promised too many forevers to have much faith in them anymore so instead I’d like to offer you right now.

Let me fall in love with your human parts – the battles you can’t fight, the wounds you can’t heal, all the ways in which you are not enough for yourself. Give me your joys and your pain in equal measure because you are the most brilliant and terrible mixture of both. I don’t want your good intentions and your well wishes. I want the whole of you, the depth of you, the breadth of all you are and the light that shines in between your broken parts. Let me fall in love with what you’re missing, what you’ve lost and what you’re still holding onto, through and despite all of it. Show me the things you haven’t lost along the way. And I will show you your own greatest strengths.

If there’s anything I am not worried about, it’s us falling apart. The truth is I never fell in love with you anyway; I walked into love – surely, deliberately and without a backwards glance. I chose you from the first day I met you and baby I promise to keep choosing you. Through every fight, I’ll choose you. Through every temptation, I’ll choose you. Through every twist and bump in the road that threatens to tear us apart I will choose you with the ferocious certainty I’ve felt since the first time I ever laid eyes on you. I’m not worried about falling out of love with you baby, because I never fell in. Loving you was a waking, conscious choice and it’s one that I’m going to keep making until the day my heart stops beating.

Because maybe the end game is worth it every time. Maybe the heartbreak is a side effect of something so brilliant that it eventually overshadows the destruction. Maybe some things don’t have to last forever in order to change you irrevocably. And once you’ve loved enough people, maybe that’s exactly what you know – that you’re strong enough to survive it. Strong enough to change from it. And strong enough and brave enough to choose the potential for growth over the fear of getting hurt, every time.

You stop waiting for someone to come back by choosing to go forward without them. And perhaps this is the saddest, simplest truth – that we must deliberately move ourselves away from the people we have loved and lost or else we will stay lost alongside them. That forward, alone, may not be the most desirable option but it is the only one we have. And we don’t get to trade in our hand.

I have driven myself mad over the years, mapping out all of these Universes for you and I. If-only this. What-if-I’d that. Tracing and trailing through our history, there are so many moments where our galaxies split in half. Where our stars realigned and our planets shifted swiftly and we found ourselves on wildly different courses than the ones we should have taken. But we don’t live in any of those Universes. We live in this one, the one where we lost each other. And this has been the hardest Universe to swallow.

This is the Universe where in ten hundred thousand tiny ways, we were wrong for each other. It’s the one where we’re always going to be.

You have to remember every dreary day that preceded the some of the best days of your life and realize that that’s where you are right now – in the middle of that rainy day when it seems like everything is going wrong. You weren’t at the end of the story back then and you’re not at the end of the story now. Just because the scene in the rearview mirror looks nicer than the scene on the road ahead doesn’t mean you’ll never reach another beautiful destination. It just means you’re not there yet.

When we have to love the things we love behind, we are allowed to mourn them. To miss them. To look back on them dejectedly and sadly. But we must never, ever forget that the best days of our lives are not all behind us. That there are more wonderful things awaiting us in the future than we could ever even fathom. That so many of our happiest days are still ahead. And that we have to keep moving to get there – no matter how tempting that view in that rearview mirror is. The future we want will not arrive without our participation. And in order to get there, we have to blindly and blissfully trust that it’s going to be somewhere indescribably worth going.