This Is Me Letting You Go

by Heidi Priebe

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.

The truth is, when we pass someone up because the timing is wrong, what we are really saying is that we don’t care to spend our time on that person.

relationships. But there may someday be a person who makes the issue of timing i

time. The idea that someday somebody will love all our flaws is a subtle excuse not to work on them.

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 di

Because if we didn’t have to search for the love of our lives, we would finally be free to

realize that we are allowed to be the loves of our own.

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.

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.

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

You fell in love with the maybes and the could-have-beens.

We want more, but we’re too tired to ask for it.

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

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

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

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.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean you must make amends with those who hurt you.

It means you’re done waiting for the person who broke you to come put you back together.

So, let’s simply call failures the one thing they always are—change. Because, by definition, our failures alter ev

Some failures are not a lesson learned but a lesson forced.

The person you tried to get it right with so hard that it felt like your heart would give up on beating, but who eventually had to let go.

When you want someone else to come and hold you close just to distract you from yourself,

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.

You need to be alone when you cannot arrive anywhere with your whole heart because love requires every last piece of it.

You cannot sacrifice and compromise yourself into a different version of yourself—one

You’re more selfish for stringing along someone who thinks you are willing to make sacrifices for them than you would be for calling a spade a spade and living your life unapolog

You need to be alone when you are growing into a new version of yourself.

You must know that it is no one else’s job to break down the walls you’ve built up—that

You need to be alone whenever you know, in your heart of hearts, that you must be.

You need to be alone when you are lost. When you are found. When you are whole. When you are broken.

You hate yourself for falling for them.

We have to forgive ourselves for missing the signs that we couldn’t possibly have seen.

Sometimes, you’ll have to let one person go a thousand different times, a thousand different ways, and there’s nothing pathetic or abnormal about that.

the phone seems so easy to pick up, but you fight the urge and keep going. Some part of you knows better—that you have to wait this out.

You’ll get over your ex the day you realize that you damn well may never get over them.

for a while, every date, every relationship, and every person you fall into lust with will continuously be held to the impossible standard of the first person who ever made a home inside

your heart, and that everyone else will fall short.

They don’t tell you that love is addicting.

They don’t tell you that your first hit of love is every bit as potent as your first hit of cocaine and that it’s a wholly unsustainable a

They don’t tell you that you need it like water and air and that no matter how hard you try to prove the opposite, a tiny part of you will always be unfulfilled without it.

some

Go out with the certainty that you gave it everything you had and didn’t hold anything back.

I have been promised too many forevers to have much faith in them anymore, so instead, I’d like to offer you right now.

Because the truth about the timing being wrong is that it’s nothing more than the world’s flimsiest reason not to try.

‘You aren’t worth any inconvenience.’ And when it comes to you, that is untrue.

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—assuredly, deliberately,

and without a backward 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.

Because I do not love people halfway, and that’s where you and I differ.

That if you wait until you feel ready, you may just be waiting forever.