This Is Me Letting You Go

by Heidi Priebe

But if the only time you see eye-to-eye is when you’re staring into each other’s, you’re signing yourself up for a lifetime of hard choices.

But is this the life either of you really want?

move on. To cut the cord. To do the hard thing that none of us want to do, and to go pursue the life that you wish you were living.

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.

Because we settle. We settle for the person we love over the person who could push us – to be bigger, stronger, greater versions of ourselves.

love shouldn’t be the thing that conquers our lives – we should be.

do more of what we love.

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.

love is wonderful but it isn’t enough to make up for an entire lifetime of compromising your core values.

Wait for the person who is gazing outward in the same direction as you are.

To fall half in love, lose faith in people.

To fall half in love with someone, move on. Go confidently forward in the direction of whatever life you’d had planned, long before they ever came along.

Let your mind wander back until you realize that it’s not them you’re missing at all – it’s the unfulfilled possibility they embodied. 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.

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.

maybe you prefer only falling half in love because it allows you to write your own ending to the story.

And theirs is a story that you want to still have and hold onto, years down the line, when you need somet...

There is always more love that we are capable of giving, more hope that we are capable of having, more passion that we’re capable of unleashing and flooding out into the world.

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.

Some parts of life happen quietly. They happen slowly. They happen because of the small, careful choices that we make everyday, that turn us into better versions of ourselves.

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.

Here is how you love without expectation: You love yourself first.

You need someone you can rely on and that person has to be you.

Put in the work. Become someone you’re proud of. If you’re who you’re left with at the end of the day, be happy with who you’ve ended up with.

choose honesty in your own endeavors.

show compassion.

You understand that you had a liability but you did not live up to it and while you may not be okay with your choices, there was a reason why the cards fell the way that they did.

other people may have similar reasons when they let you down – reasons that have nothing to do with you at all.

You learn to detach from your personal investment in why people do what they do, because ch...

you have infinitely less to do with other people’s actions than you’ve always believed. And you learn to be fine with that...

learn what’s not in you...

At the end of the day, you have two choices in love – one is to accept someone just as they are a...

appreciate what’s there.

All we can do is appreciate who we have when we have them, and let them go when we do not.

all we can do is refuse occupancy. But we cannot force anyone to stay.

But here’s the thing about anger: it’s an instrumental emotion. We stay angry because we want justice. Because we think it’s useful. Because we assume that the angrier we are, the more change we will be capable of incurring. Anger doesn’t realize that the past is over and the damage has been done. It tells you that vengeance will fix things. It’s on the pursuit of justice. Except the justice we want isn’t always realistic.

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.

Because here’s what they all fail to tell you about forgiveness: It’s not going to fix anything. It’s not an eraser that will wipe away the pain of what’s happened to you. It does not undo the pain that you’ve been living with and grant you immediate peace. Finding peace is a long, uphill battle. Forgiveness is just what you take to stay hydrated along the way.

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,...

It means walking bravely into the future, with every scar and callous you’ve incurred along the way. 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.

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.

But we don’t talk about what it feels like to not want to believe in ourselves anymore in the wake of a mistake. We don’t talk about what it feels like when it seems like we don’t deserve to get up off the floor and try again. We don’t talk about the shame that accompanies those huge, avoidable errors that we make, because we eternally want that silver lining that saves us from ourselves. And we can’t bear the thought that there may not be one.

Not all failures are worthy of redemption

You may never see the sil...

When you’re knocked from a villainous pedestal, that sense of failure is crippling because it leaves you alone with yourself. It forces you to face up to every wrong decision that led you up to that point and to realize who you’ve become as a result.

Failure isn’t always about learning a lesson, and to imply as much is demeaning to everyone involved. Some mistakes invoke to much collateral damage to merit a positive spin. So let’s simply call failures the one thing that they always are – change. Because by definition, our failures alter everything.

Some catastrophes are not there to teach you a lesson, but to stop you in your tracks. To humble you. To disassemble the parts of yourself that were operating from a place of pain and to destroy them before they take you over. Some failures are as painful and as disarming as they are because they’re there to hold you back from an even worse fate – a life that brings you further and further away from the person you want to be. Some failures are not a lesson learned but a lesson forced. And it’s so often the exact lesson we need.

So here’s what we do when we get knocked off that pedestal: We get up. Not because we’re empowered. Not because we necessarily deserve to. Not because we ought to give whatever twisted goal we were pursuing another go but because we owe it to the world to get up. To make a change. To let our failures resonate and alter us in ways we would never have previously considered.

Let the rest of your life be the apology that you and your loved ones and the Universe needs from you. Let that be you getting back up.

But therein lies the choice – you get to decide, after every failure, every defeat, every life-altering mistake – what kind of person you are. What kind of person you’ve been. And what kind of person you’re finally ready to become instead.