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.

Life happens before we are ready for it.

Because the truth about letting go is that it doesn’t take on a single shape or form. It happens in stops and starts. In stretches and setbacks. In moments where the world feels wide-open and days where all your doors are slamming shut.

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

Because nobody else can let go for you.

Because the truth is that good morning texts are more than a half-hearted means of communication. They are a sign that we are thought of. Cared for. Adored, by someone who may not be immediately present. They are a reminder – one we perhaps should not need but sometimes do – that we are appreciated in our entireties.

At the end of the day, we’re all in charge of what we bring to our lives. So be the person who brings light to your own, even if nobody else shows up to it.

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 when someone is right for us, we make the time to let them into our lives. And that kind of timing is always right.

Just be the person you’ve been waiting for. Live your life as if you are the love of it. Because that’s the only thing you know for sure – that through every triumph, every failure, every fear and every gain that you will ever experience until the day you die, you are going to be present. 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 and if those things are not love-of-your-life qualities, I don’t know what are.

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.

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

But is this the life either of you really want? Is this the life you’ll be happy with when you look back at it? Will you be glad that you compromised and put aside your desires for another person? If the answer is yes, then you’re set. Some compromises are worth it. But if the answer is no, then 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.

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. We tell ourselves that love is enough. That it conquers everything. But we forget that love shouldn’t be the thing that conquers our lives – we should be. And we should do it deliberately, triumphantly, by the side of somebody who shares all of our joys and successes.

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

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. We have to allow ourselves the time to let those alterations happen. To watch them evolve. To not grow hopelessly frustrated in the in-between.

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 need someone you can rely on and that person has to be you. At the end of the day, if everyone else bails and flakes and fails to show, you will still be there. So don’t look at yourself as a sad consolation prize. 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. Make sure it’s someone you’d pick over a flakey, unreliable love interest or friend.

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.

To love without expectation, you learn to appreciate what’s there. Other people are not ours to own or rearrange or expect things from and the more anticipation we pit onto others, the more we let ourselves down in the end. All we can do is appreciate who we have when we have them, and let them go when we do not. To lend our hearts like vacant hotel rooms: celebrating others when they come in and letting them go when they leave. Understanding that at the end of the day, all we can do is refuse occupancy. But we cannot force anyone to stay.

To love without expectation, you have to be okay with yourself. Okay with opening your doors, spreading your arms, baring your heart and understanding that not everyone is going to be gentle with it. You have to know that you can recover from those aches, that you can heal your own wounds, that you c...

The truth about anger is that it’s nothing more than the refusal to heal, because you’re scared to.

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.

It just means accepting that they’ve left a mark on you. And that for better or for worse, that mark is now your burden to bear. It means you’re done waiting for the person who broke you to come put you back together. It’s the decision to heal your own wounds, regardless of which marks they’re going to leave on your skin. It’s the decision to move forward with scars.

We don’t talk about our huge, overwhelming, most shameful failures because we don’t want to admit what they reveal about who we are. 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.

You need to be alone whenever you know, in your heart of hearts, that you must be. When all the reason and feeling and logic in the entire world are stacked up against you and yet some part of you still wants to walk away. You need to be alone whenever some quiet, gentle part of yourself suggests that now is not the time. Here is not the place. They are not the person.

You need to be alone whenever you are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole and it just won’t twist in to fit. You need to be alone when you are lost. When you are found. When you are whole. When you are broken.

Someday you’ll understand that you can be all of those things alongside somebody else. But first and foremost, you ne...

It is not human nature to let go. We are, at our core, territorial creatures. We fight to hold onto what we love. Giving up isn’t in any way instinctual.

If there’s anything I wish we could talk more about it’s the in-between stages of letting someone go. Because nobody lets go in an instant. You let go once. And then you let go again. And then again and again and again. You let someone go at the grocery store when their favorite type of soup is on sale and you don’t buy it. You let them go again when you’re cleaning your bathroom and have to throw out the bottle of the body wash that smells like them. You let them go that night at the bar when you go home with somebody else or you let them go every year on the anniversary of the day you lost them. Sometimes you’re going to have to let one person go a thousand different times, a thousand different ways, and there’s nothing pathetic or abnormal about that. You are human. And it isn’t always as simple as making one decision and never looking back.

The truth is, none of us want to think of ourselves as works in progress. We want everything to happen instantaneously: Falling in love, falling out of it, letting go of what we know we ought to leave in the past and moving on to whatever comes next. We hate the in-between spaces – the times when we’re okay but not quite there yet. The periods where we suspect that growth is happening but have nothing to show for it. The days when everything feels like it’s falling into place and yet we still go home and cry into our pillow because there’s nobody to share our good fortune with. If success is a staircase, we are eternally taking two steps forward and one step back and that’s okay. That’s how we keep ourselves in check. It’s how we keep ourselves from blowing the whole she-bang.

We have to be patient with ourselves as we move through the parts in between the where we’ve been and where we’re going. We have to let the chasm motivate rather than dishearten us. It’s okay to not be there yet. It’s okay to be unsure of every step that you take forward. We don’t talk about how moving on sometimes feels like we’re fighting every part of our most basic instincts, but we should. We should talk about how growth is often every bit as painful as it is beautiful.

Because growth and letting go are so complexly intertwined that we often only see one or the other. We forget that they can exist side by side – releasing the old while letting in the new. We forget that we have the ability to do the exact same thing. And that if we’d only stop beat...

Some part of you knows better – that you have to wait this out. You have to take it in waves. You know that someday you’ll forget their birthday and they’ll forget yours too and until that day you keep yourself busy. You keep moving. And you keep letting the small details slide.

your life has become only your own again.

You’re not broken or hopeless or loveless just because your heart is aching – you are simply healing yourself. And when you’re done, there will be a whole new world waiting for you.

You will not get over your ex all at once. You’ll get over them through a series of tiny, tender moments that bring you quietly back to yourself. And in some ways they’ll never really leave you. The people who change us in those big, irrevocable ways never do. To get over them we’d have to alter ourselves into people so unrecognizable that we’d lose who we are in the process. And so instead we learn to integrate the influence they had – the books you now read because of topics that they turned you on to. The music you now download because of the lyrics they loved. The ways you now look at the world that would never had occurred to you if they had not opened your eyes up to seeing and doing things differently. We don’t ever lose people we love in their entirety and perhaps we never should – we ourselves become bigger, more encompassing people because of it.

You’ll get over your ex the day you realize that you damn well may never get over them. That pieces of them are going to live on inside you forever and that discarding them would mean discarding parts of yourself. But the day that you get to move on is the day you simply decide to do so in spite of it – in spite of the tired, restless ache that begs you not to take a chance. In spite of the fearful, self-conscious mind that tells you nobody will ever love you better. In spite of every careless part of you that wants to keep holding on but knows that it needs to let go. The day when you finally move ...

Just be the freaking person who cares more. Be the person who tries harder, loves stronger, gives more of a shit than all of the half-alive people who surround them. Be the person who answers their messages, shows up to their commitments and doesn’t leave others hanging or guessing at their eternally vague intentions. 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.

Because the last thing this world needs is one more indifferent person. If you’re the only one left with passion, then use it. Use the hell out of it. At the end of your life, go out with a bruised-up, worn out heart that gave too much and loved too strongly and felt too fiercely. Go out with the certainty that you gave it everything you had and didn’t hold anything back. Go out empty-handed when it comes to should-haves and might-have-beens. Because it’s an infinitely more fulfilling way to live than the alternative. It will always be more honorable to be out in the field getting trampled on than to be on the sidelines feeling superior for never having tried.

Take a chance on me. Because the timing’s always going to be wrong and the stars are never going to align but I would break every clock in this city and I’d shut every star down from shining if it meant that for one afternoon we could cast all that aside and give in. Give in to the complete impossibility that something could work here, despite everything that stands in the way. Give in to the way that your touch makes me shiver and your words make my mind race and reel. Give in to the improbability that this is going to work out or end well or fall into place exactly as we’d hoped or that any of it will be even half worth it in the end. Give in to senselessness. Give in to you, finally giving in to me.

Take a chance on me because no chance ever works out. Because every relationship seems to end in heartbreak and every new beginning eventually reaches a conclusion but we have all of the time in the world between those two points and I intend to enjoy every second. Because someday I might hate the way you squint when you’re concentrating and you might despise the way I pace when I’m nervous but right now you are perfect and endearing and pure and why shouldn’t we get to enjoy that? Because everything ends eventually and the whole point is to love what’s in between and if for me that gets to be you, then I am happy.

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. I can offer you only this moment, where I’m standing in front of you knowing all of this may someday fall apart but that someday is not what I’m looking for anymore. I have right here and right now and all I can hope is that that is enough. That we can figure out the future as it comes. Take a chance on me – because I want to take a chance on you. And it only has to work out once.

We ended up in the era with planes and trains and cars and cell phones and Skype calls. We ended up in the age of relentless communication and instantaneous connection. Of all the possible worlds that we could have gotten stuck in, we found ourselves living in a time when it’s possible to wake up to a good morning text every day from someone who is clear across the world. And when you look at it that way, it doesn’t seem so bad. When you look at it that way, it doesn’t seem unbearable to wait for a couple more months or a few painstaking years or a single stretch of absence that will eventually be bridged. When you look at it from the angle of the bleak improbability that two people like you and I would ever co-exist, the timing doesn’t seem so wrong at all. Because really, who are you and I to demand any more from the Universe? Who are we to mandate that the stars all align in our favor and the fortunes always cater to our fates? When we chisel it down to probability, we’ve already come out on top here. So it’s only fair we put in some work.

We learn to be alone again. And it’s not so bad, after all – we can depend on ourselves, we can plan our own futures, we can live our lives wholly and selfishly without having to worry about who we are harming.