This Is Me Letting You Go

by Heidi Priebe

We lose something we love, and it seems natural to try to reconstruct it—mulling over memories, sorting through missteps, bleeding our expired hopes and habits onto paper, hoping some part of what we’ve loved will still be salvageable.

This is a book about moving on when you don’t want to.

Because the truth about letting go is that it doesn’t take on a single shape or form. It happens in stops and starts.

Letting go isn’t simple or straightforward. It’s a dynamic, lifelong process.

Because nobody else can let go for you. But we could all use some company along the way.

We forget that we are lovable. We forget that we’re desired.

running). I’m texting you this because I think about your body sometimes, pressed up against mine, and what that would mean and how awesome that would feel.

What in your mind aligns with mine, and where does it deviate?

One relationship ends because our partner isn’t ready to get serious, and another ends because they’re getting serious too soon.

the people we meet at the wrong time are actually just the wrong people.

that's a lowkey decent thought

You never meet the right people at the wrong time because the right people are timeless. The right people make you want to throw away the plans you originally had for one and follow them into the hazy, unknown future without a glance backward.

That no matter what you thought you wanted before, this is better. Everything has been better since they came along.

The right people encourage you to try harder, dream bigger, and do better.

i should never ever forget about that!!!

The right people don’t impose limits on your time, your dreams, or your abilities. They want to tackle those mountains with you, and they don’t care how long it takes. With the right person, you have all the time in the world.

Read This If You’re Worried That You’ll Never Find ‘The One’

*sighs*

Love’s what inspires most of your greatest changes.

Without the fear of ending up alone, the opportunities open to you would become endless.

Because the ironic truth is, you are most attractive when you’re not worried about who you’re attracting.

Who to spend the rest of our lives with, and what to do if we want completely different things out of it than they do.

Picking the person you love over the life that you want means your sense of self-worth will slowly degrade and deteriorate over years of contentedly slipping into bed beside someone you’re comfortable with.

Love is wonderful, worthwhile, and enriching, but it should never be a standoff between the person and the life you want.

true true

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 have, at the bare minimum, a relationship that allows for growth and exploration on the part of both parties.

What you have when you have a relationship that forces you to whittle or water yourself down is a mismatch of values.

If the answer is yes, then you’re set. Some compromises are worth it. But if the answer is no, I encourage you to 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.

So how do we meet such a person? That’s simple—we do more of what we love.

You don’t want to spend forever gazing into somebody’s eyes, expecting to find all of the answers you need inside of them. Wait for the person who is gazing outward in the same direction as you are.

To fall half in love with someone, recognize it too late.

To fall half in love with someone, jump ship. Realize that you’re not ready for full love, for real love, for the kind of love that nurtures and catches and heals.

To fall half in love, leave before you have the chance to fall fully because you aren’t ready to let that overtake you. You aren’t prepared to wander through that wasteland again.

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.

But every now and then, let your mind...

Every now and then, remain transfixed on the memory of their skin against yours, of their hands in your hair, of the quiet, patient moments where laughter unexpectedly escaped your lips lying beside them. 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.

bro. dont even start there

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

You don’t rearrange your schedule to accommodate someone who may bail at the last moment anyway.

If you don’t want games, you stop playing them. You text back. You show up. You say what you mean, and you don’t make time for maybes.

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.

Forgiveness is a vast, un-traversable land for those who crave justice.

Forgiveness means giving up hope for a different past.

Forgiveness means accepting responsibility—not for causing the destruction, but for cleaning it up.

Some failures aren’t about bouncing right back up and giving it another go. Some failures are about genuine change.

The person whose words and body never fit right with yours, whose thoughts weren’t the yin to your yang, whose words never quite sounded right but whom you tried to love despite and because of it all.

You cannot force love into existence. And letting it bloom somewhere else only makes us all freer in the end.

We didn’t know what a difference it would make to love ourselves until we finally did.

And thank God. The day we stop making mistakes is the day we stop living.

When you want someone else to come and hold you close just to distract you from yourself, you need to learn to hold your own hand.

but do i actually regret asking for help when things were tough for me??

The person you’re going to fall in love with deserves all your beginnings and none of your endings. If you’re still torn up about the past, and it is bleeding straight into the future, it might mean that you need more time to heal.