A Series Of People I Had To Learn To Let Go

The best-friend who stopped talking to me after her cooler friends who taught her how to straighten her hair deemed me unworthy to sit in the back five seats of the bus with them.

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1. The best-friend who stopped talking to me after her cooler friends who taught her how to straighten her hair deemed me unworthy to sit in the back five seats of the bus with them.

2. The roommate who abandoned me when things stopped being polite and started getting real. (Aka: when I was honest about her boyfriend and she picked him over me.)

3. The friendship that I guess had an expiration date, and I’m still not fully sure why it ended.

4. The one who insisted on giving very good advice but absolutely never following it and had to blow up her own life while everyone just watched.

5. The girl at the bar who took my number and texted, but I wasn’t sure what to say after, “hi” and she wasn’t sure what to say after a smiley face.

6. The girl who fabricated an entire story about me and then insisted on using it as a reason to make up some non-existent rivalry between us.

7. The professor who decided it was okay to make comments about my physical appearance Freshman year, and who never acknowledged the hypocrisy in that “criticism.”

8. The family who blindly decided to place all blame for a situation on me in order to use it as a way to turn a blind eye and mask their own enablement.

9. The one where there were always things like miles, timing, and logistics between us, but I had to accept and be okay with that and also accept that it’s okay to hope that things like those won’t exist someday.

10. The girl who was only friends with me because she was in love with my boyfriend.

11. And that boy who deserved to be in love without me.

12. The neighbor who I crushed on for a minute, but who was more interested in my Twitter account than in me.

13. The people who couldn’t accept me when I didn’t accept their own beliefs, and failed to see the hypocrisy in disregarding the whole “love one another” section of the Bible.

14. The one who chose to ignore criticism and use that as a motivation to get better, and decided they were completely comfortable just floating around in mediocrity and being so painfully average.

15. The one who made my life completely infuriating for two months, and who to this day doesn’t understand why I choose to keep my distance.

16. The ones who found it so, so easy to let go of me.

17. Past versions of myself who no longer serve as a lesson. Thought Catalog Logo Mark