To All The People Who Gave Up On Me, Thank You

Thank you for giving up on me, thank you for believing that I’ll never be good enough and for making me feel like I’ll never be someone you appreciate or respect.

If it wasn’t for your constant disapproval and rejection, I wouldn’t have found my own voice and I wouldn’t have found the courage and the strength to fight your voices and follow my own.

Thank you for giving up on me so easily, you taught me how to fight for myself.

Thank you for not waiting for me or giving me a chance. Thank you for being impatient and thinking that this is all there is to me. Thank you for pushing me away and guiding me to a better place, guiding me to find better people who believed in me and accepted me and thank you for giving me a reason to walk away from you forever — a reason never to look back.

Thank you for not missing me when I was gone, thank you for not trying to win me back, thank you for showing me how l meant nothing to you. You made me realize that you were full of lies, you were fake, nothing about you was real and we never really had anything in common.

Thank you for your lies because they showed me the truth and thank you for your departure because it forced me to find new beginnings, to find new roads and to let go of the past that you were once part of.

Thank you for making me feel like I’m hard to love, thank you for choosing other people over me, thank you for making me feel unworthy because you taught me to see my worth, you taught me to choose myself and you taught me that no matter how difficult I can be, I still deserve to be loved. I deserve to be embraced with all my flaws, but more than anything, thank you for showing me that I don’t deserve you.

Thank you for giving up on me when I needed you to be there. Thank you for letting me down when I thought you would lift me up and thank you for closing the door when I came knocking on it.

You taught me how to survive, you taught me how to depend on myself and how to find my happiness away from you. You made me realize that I don’t have to be defined by how you saw me or how you treated me. You made me realize that I can redefine myself and my life.

Thank you for getting out of my life, I know now that losing you was the only way to find myself and I know that I needed you to give up on me so I can fight for myself. 

Thank you for giving up on me when I didn’t love myself, instead of destroying me, I built myself up, instead of making me cry, you made me smile.

I’m smiling because what you thought was a tragedy turned out to be my happy ending, and what you thought was an ending turned out to be my beginning. 

Rania Naim is a poet and author of the new book All The Words I Should Have Said, available here.