why letting people go is okay.
During my short 17 years of life, the mental barrier I’ve battled with the most has been coming to terms with permanence and the fact that not everyone in my life is designed to stay in it.
When I say I’ve struggled with this for as long as I can remember, I truly mean it. From pleading with my parents not to get rid of a blanket that’s practically a shred of cloth now, to people that I’ve begged to stay, I struggle with the sentiment behind every connection I bear. I can’t seem to grasp the concept of temporariness.
In order to make peace with this, people tend to say things like, “Well, what one person or thing gives you, another can give you all the same.”
I could never adopt this outlook no matter how hard I tried. I see everyone for their unique characteristics: for the way they make me feel, the way they smile, the way they laugh, or the way they think. These things are impossible to replicate from person to person. My brain would desperately cling to these attributes and I’d feel my heart tangle around their being like friendship bracelet string. Then, when they’d drift out of my life, I could never admit to myself that it was permanent.
There would be a human-sized hole left by every single person that I’d love and leave: all uniquely shaped and without a match to fill its place.
It wasn’t until I changed my perspective that I found peace with this.
I stopped trying to force myself to feel less for people that I outgrew because nobody would be able to fill these “holes” the same way somebody else had.
Not really, at least, and that was okay.
In other words, I stopped viewing the way my brain worked as negative and instead as something positive.
I’m so lucky to be able to experience deep connections, but a part of being human means that I also realize these connections are fleeting.
And that’s part of their beauty.
I take the memories and lessons from those I love and store them in some place precious. I am grateful for not only the people that stay but for the people that don’t, because the things I learn are just as valuable.
When I adopted the mindset that things don’t happen to me, but for me, and that rejection is redirection, this was so much easier.
It suddenly made sense: people’s value in my life was not at all determined by the duration they stayed in it. I could love somebody wholeheartedly for only three months, let them go, and the love wouldn’t have been futile, the lessons would still have been learned, and the memories wouldn’t vanish.
I’ll meet hundreds more people who will digress in and out of my life as silently as ghosts and that’s completely okay.
We are tapestries of all the people we have met, which means we must be okay with people sewing their strings into our lives, leaving their mark on each stitch, and then letting us go.
❤ Sophia Rundle
