This Is Me Letting You Go

by Heidi Priebe

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

What do you think of this thing that I find funny? What in your mind aligns with mine, and where does it deviate? What do I enjoy that you despise? What do you analyze that I glaze over unnoticed? I’m texting you this because I want to know your thoughts on something—anything, really. Your mind is an infinite library that I would like to peruse for a while.

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.

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.

You are going to be the person who shows up to accept your rewards. You are going to be the person who holds your own hand when you’re broken. You are going to be the person who gets yourself up off the floor every time you get knocked down,

I know you’re dying for someone to tell you that this does not mean you’re incapable of love. That you simply have not found the right person yet—the one who wakes up in the night burning with the same fire that burns inside you, thrumming with the same energy that drives you and reeling on forward with the same sort of reckless abandon that beckons you, too. 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, and come across that great love a little bit differently. You are the flame, not the moth. And your job is to burn with conviction.

It is okay in a way that you have never been told, perhaps because you’ve never met anyone like you. And that is a shame. It is a shame there aren’t more people like you.

I know you are a series of infinite contradictions within yourself, and you would like to understand them so badly that some days you want to scream. You want to rip the inconsistencies out of your body and learn to live simply and whole-heartedly. I know that for you, whole-hearted will always be a transient state. Happiness will always be an ever-moving target. Fulfillment will never be a subway stop that you get off at. It will forever be the chase, the fervor, the constant need for more.

Love shouldn’t have to be the biggest compromise of your life. I know that you’ve been told otherwise. You’ve watched movies, read novels, and heard adages from relatives and friends who perhaps have very successful relationships—love requires constant compromise. You can’t have it all. And perhaps they are right. You can’t have it all. But you should be able to have what matters.

What you have when you have a relationship that forces you to whittle or water yourself down is a mismatch of values. You may have found someone you love. Even someone you want to spend your life with. 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.

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.

At the end of the day, love is wonderful, but it isn’t enough to make up for an entire lifetime of compromising your core values. You don’t want to spend forever gazing into somebody’s eyes, expecting to find all of the answers you need inside of them.

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.

I know how impossible it can feel to go on trying and giving and becoming when you are exhausted straight through to the soul. I know that the cheerful ideals you were once promised now seem tired and hopeless. But here’s what I beg if you’re this close to giving up: give it one more try with feeling. I know you’re tired of your attempts. I know that you’re at your wit’s end. But the truth about that second wind of passion is that you’re never going to realize you have it if you do not keep on running past your first.

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.

Staying angry is like continually picking the scab off a cut because you think that if you keep the wound open, you won’t get a scar. It’s thinking that someday, the person who wronged you can come give you stitches with such incredible precision that you’ll never know the cut was once there. 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 fix the damage. 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 doesn’t mean that you are giving up all of your power. Forgiveness means you’re finally ready to take it back.

When you are not ready to give someone your whole heart out of fear of what they’ll do with it, it is yourself that you must learn how to trust. It’s yourself you must come back to, piece by careful piece, as you learn that your heart is an endless, refillable vessel that does not deplete and fall apart when it is given away. It is yourself that you must learn to be alone with.

They don’t tell you that love will be work. That it won’t always be a freely flowing stream of adoration and attention and growth. That sometimes love will mean choices you don’t want to make and roads you don’t want to take, and that it’s going to be every bit as unglamorous as it is incredible and brave. They don’t tell you that love might turn you into someone you don’t want to be. And that you’re going to have to do a lot of learning if you ever want to grow inside of love.

Somebody always has to care more. This is the unfortunate cardinal rule of how relationships function. If one person didn’t care a teeny bit more than the other, no one would ever get asked out. Or proposed to. Or counseled back from the brink of divorce. Someone always has to put in a tiny bit more effort than the other party is offering. Throughout the course of your life, you’re going to be on both sides of the situation at least once. You’re going to be loved by someone who you just kind of like. You’re going to be head over heels for someone who essentially thinks you’re okay. And I can almost entirely assure you that you’re going to loathe the latter situation. We all do. Being the one who cares more makes you feel uncomfortably desperate—like you suddenly have to justify your entire existence to somebody else.

You’ll comb through possible reasons why they are not as ethereally pumped about you as you are about them, and you’ll come up empty-handed at best, filled with self-doubt at worst. You will resolve to care less. You will strive to inhibit the most basic emotional response possible to a situation that you are happy about. And you know what? That is bullshit.

Be the person you wish you were dating. If you’re sick of the game, then stop playing it. If you’re tired of the bullshit, then cut it.

If you care less, cut the cord. If you care more, then show it. Answer your messages. Show up to your commitments. Don’t scale back or water down your passion to keep up with someone dead inside. Arrive with enthusiasm to every waking moment of your life.