I Am Not Going To Miss You In 2025

I spent every day of 2024 missing you.

That’s the sort of thing we’re not supposed to admit out loud: that we can spend entire years caught up in the memory of somebody else, even when our lives are expanding and taking off around us.

We’re supposed to be stronger than that.

We’re supposed to be people who bounce back: from pain, from rejection, from loneliness, from hurt. I spent every day of this past year trying to be stronger than that hurt. But for so much of it, I was not.

I missed you while we were still together. I missed you in each moment I felt you pull away, in every memory of the way things used to be, in every scarcely uttered “I love you” that felt more like a plea from a sinking ship than a genuine expression of affection. I missed you while you fell asleep beside me, I missed you when I woke up alone.

I missed you for so long after you left.

I missed you on the lips of every other person I kissed, in the hollow attempts to love someone new. I missed you in the dead of night with the blinds drawn, and in the middle of the brightest days, when the Universe was alive and expanding around me.

I spent three hundred and sixty-five days without you and I missed you with one hundred percent of my heart, every day for one year.

But I will not do so for a year and one day.

2025 marks the end of me missing you.

I know it’s not as simple as that – that loving someone doesn’t disappear because a clock strikes twelve and a year ends and a new one begins. I know that feelings take time to work themselves out of our systems and that it may be a very long time before you no longer cross my mind. But here is what I can claim: 2025 is the year where I finally stop enabling my own pain.

This is the year where I stop picking at old wounds, begging them to bleed because it’s easier to tend to those wounds than it is to heal them. It’s the year I stop comparing everyone to you, letting them fall short before I even give them a chance. It’s the year I cancel the pity party – even if it’s easier to attend than to show up to my life and try again.

2025 is the year where I stop dwelling on what could have been and accept what is.

This is the year where my triumphs belong to me. Where every challenge, every conquest, and every victory is mine alone – untainted by the shadow of someone else’s absence. It’s the year I embrace my own glories and my failures, knowing I’m strong enough to hold both.

This is the year I’ll be present.

I’ll kiss new lips without comparing them to the past. I’ll start new projects without wondering what you would think. I’ll plan my future with freedom, because it belongs to me. This is the year where I allow the present to expand into something extraordinary, because it’s finally good enough for me.

As the year unfolds, I hope you’re happy, too. I hope you’ve found your way, kissed someone wonderful, and let me go as completely as I’m learning to let go of you.

I hope you’re happy in 2025. Because I’m finally ready to be happy on my own.

And I don’t have any more time to waste on being unsure.

This post was adapted from 2014 essay by Heidi Priebe, author of This Is Me Letting You Go, published by Thought Catalog Books.