Yes, they say the best thing to do is to walk away, but how do you do that?
“The truth is, unless you let go, unless you forgive yourself, unless you forgive the situation, unless you realize that the situation is over, you cannot move forward.”
― Steve Maraboli
Yes, you’ve loved this person with everything in you. He was once your light, your joy, and everything in between. Somehow, you’re supposed to let it go all at once? How do they even expect you to do that?
Almost every woman who has loved has asked this question more than once. The truth is you can, you can let go, but it’s not an easy decision. The saying, “slow and steady, wins the race” in this journey is very much implicated.
We are humans, we develop ties and bonds with people we interact with so everything we feel is almost expected. One sure thing I have come to learn is that nobody has it all figured out.
I can tell you for a fact that you’re allowed exactly as much time you spent loving someone, to spend that same amount of time or more to “unlove” them. Take as much time as you need, but remember, there are no pressures.
We, humans, are constantly under this illusion that time is against us but if we only but pause and realize that we are the makers or creators of our own time, our lives would be much more worth living—to the fullest.
If you need to cry, cry a bucket. If you need to talk about it, talk about it. The most important thing is to feel free and have peace of mind as your healing happens.
One thing we do is to start looking for faults in us that we can blame on ourselves because we feel we are not worthy of their love. We have put them in so much control of our lives, we made everything revolve around them so after it’s over, we find it hard to live without them literally.
Some may say that the best way to get over a guy is to get on top of a new one Well, I don’t entirely disagree or agree. It does help sometimes but the greatest thing you can do for yourself is to let yourself go through this healing process completely alone—without a new partner.
Let’s read through Vanessa’s story and pick some lessons from it
Vanessa’s Story
I always thought that love was supposed to have a great amount of hurt, maybe because all the love I had experienced brought me nothing but pain. I had always thought love was truly blind, the greatest joke of my life as at then.
Maybe because my expectations as they always told me was high, and that I should be grateful for whatever love I got. I like a fool believed them all. If only I knew all those years ago that all I ever wanted was just to be loved right.
The night I was free—and I mean that literally—was the day I decided to choose myself.
I was “in love” with Dan at the time.
It was on a Thursday. I sat on the toilet seat at about 3 am, and as I peed on the stick, tears raced down my cheeks. I let it flow as I absentmindedly stared at the test strip in my hands, hoping and praying that the stick doesn’t turn blue, I just asked out loud, why does it hurt so bad? Thankfully, he was deeply asleep.
Whether I meant physically or emotionally, I felt pain in my chest. Maybe this was just a pile-up of all the hurt I had had to suppress—I had caused me would be a better phrase— due to my continuous denial of what was happening.
I started asking myself, how are you sitting on this toilet seat, in the house of a man who has constantly shown you he doesn’t care about you, scared to death about being pregnant for him while he is peacefully sleeping? How much low can you go? What’s the worst that could happen that hasn’t happened already?
I looked at the strip and I heaved a sigh of relief, it was negative. I climbed back to bed but I couldn’t sleep.
Situationships can be messy and complicated but in truth, we do the complications ourselves. Typical Dan would love you now, treat you right, then cut off all contacts with you whenever he wished to, reconnected back at his will, still asked me to come spend time with him and I’ll foolishly go. Knowing fully that I’m not the only one he was strafing.
I know you’re irritated, if I hadn’t lived it, I would be as well.
The funny part of this is that I only saw this relationship—or situationship—from my fantasized point of view, never from an objective view, or his view, or even my supposed view. I only saw what I wanted to see and that destroyed me inside.
“You are stupid, you don’t love yourself, you don’t want to help yourself, you keep going back and why can’t you use your head for once.” Well, I’ve told myself all these countless times over and yet I’m still here peeing on a stick, scared to death about being pregnant for the umpteenth time. I mean it was always under the guise of “we can’t resist each other”, girl, please!
I just spent a whole week with him as if nothing had happened, as if I’m not hurt or fed up under the guise that love forgives! How?
I lay on the bed facing the wall and just stared. Do I feel so unloved that I was so okay accepting the scraps of love I was receiving?
I thought of the call he had received earlier in the day from some other girl. Although he “respected” me enough—isn’t that what we call respect—to take the call in the bathroom, it was just as loud because I could hear them. He also came right back into my arms like nothing happened and I, as foolish as I was, pretended not to have noticed.
His phone buzzed me back to reality and I picked it up thinking it was mine. I saw a text from “LOML” meaning- love of my life. I was blank. I didn’t open the message, I kept his phone beside him and closed my eyes, I was done.
When he woke up in the morning, I was already packed. You’re leaving today? He asked.
I told him I had a test on Monday so I had to go back to prepare. Although he didn’t believe it, he accepted it. He called me an Uber and accompanied me to the airport all the while asking me if I was okay that I seemed unusual. I reassured him I was fine.
The forty-five minutes I spent on air, I thought about my life and how I just spent a whole week again in his place, feeling the exact way I always feel—unworthy, unloved—but this time there was something else I felt, freedom.
I had always wanted to let go but I never quite got the courage to do so. It was scary just thinking of it but I was determined that I had had enough. I was finally going to choose myself. The night I got home, he called to know if I had gotten home.
After that call, I unsaved his number and deleted it, unfollowed him on all social media platforms, closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep—to start my cleansing journey the next day.
Looking back now, I’m very thankful that I made that decision, and I promised myself that I would never allow myself to be disrespected or made to feel unworthy in that way ever again.
If Vanessa had voiced out how she felt from the beginning, or if she had acknowledged the red flags she observed, or if she had learned to love herself enough, she wouldn’t have lived through this. She would have known it was much better to be alone than to be in a situationship and be treated like crap.
The first step in letting go is loving yourself enough, finding your worth, knowing you deserve it all, and deciding that you come first. If you don’t accept all these, you might never truly let go.
If you have to delete or block all contacts as long as you want, for you to heal, then do so. It doesn’t mean you won’t derail but making that conscious decision to continuously pick yourself up after each setback is key.
Don’t be hard on yourself, don’t try to move on faster than you can, just know and accept that healing happens gradually.
Just take it one step at a time and in a few years like Vanessa, you’d look back and be proud you did.
And then, you’d be able to tell your story.
