I Wish You Had Never Taught Me The Things You Did

Joshua Rawson-Harris

I wish you had never taught me that people leave. They stop loving each other. They stop caring. They check out long before they physically leave. They just abandon everything; the past, the present and the future. They become so selfish. They change overnight. They disappear the next morning and sometimes they never come back.

I wish you had never taught me that I shouldn’t trust even the closest people to my heart. I wish you weren’t a real-life example of why I shouldn’t trust people, why I shouldn’t get too close, why too much love can eventually destroy you.

I wish you had never taught me how to be alone and love it because now I got used to it. Now I don’t fight to get out of it. Now it’s my second home. Now it doesn’t scare me because I know it all too well. I wish you had never taught me that I can survive on my own because it makes me not even want to try. It makes me let people go. It makes force myself to unfeel everything and unlove everyone.

I wish you had never taught me how to be my own worst enemy. I wish you didn’t show me how to be so hard on myself and scrutinize every little flaw and magnify it. I wish you had never taught me to hate everything I see in the mirror because you hated everything you saw. You made me feel like I’ll never be good enough. You made me feel like everything was my fault. You never wanted me to make any mistakes. You never wanted me to live.

I wish you had taught me how to love, how to care, how to feel safe, how to forgive myself, how to grow and how to dream. I wish you had taught me that people stay when things get hard.

I wish you had taught me that my imperfections make me real and they could be accepted. I wish you had taught me that it was okay to be myself. I wish you had given me the confidence to take the world by storm. I wish you had given me the kind of love that I don’t need to look for anywhere else. I wish you had filled my life with joy instead of the permeating emptiness that’s now deeply rooted in my heart.

I wish I could go back in time and unlearn everything you had taught me but I can’t and I must learn how to live with these lessons. I must learn how to change these lessons. I must teach myself everything you should have taught me. I must pay the price for all your mistakes and find a way to correct them. I must learn everything again without you.

But out of all the things you taught me, I wish you had taught me how to forgive you. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

Writing makes me feel alive. Words heal me.

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