This Is Me Choosing To Love Myself (Instead Of You)

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It has been truly amazing, to have played such a huge part of your life, to be considered a constant in the span of time that we shared. Oh, how glorious the days were and for that, you gave me enough memories to cherish for a lifetime.

But this time, while I still can, while I still have this sane part of me, I’m choosing myself.

If I don’t do this now, I might not want to anymore.

This time, I’m saving myself – from the potential and inevitable hurt. I can’t let myself think of your presence as permanent when our visions for the future are too different. Sooner or later, we’ll reach that fork on the road where you’ll go left and I’ll go right. When that time comes, I want to have the strength to take a step towards my own future, even if it meant the greater possibility of not having you in it the way I pictured it to be.

This isn’t me pushing you away. This is me finally putting my own needs first. Never will I regret the times I chose your happiness and your emotions over mine. Never will I regret the sacrifices I made, the judgment I took, the friendships tested. Never will I regret doing those for you because my desire to keep that smile on your face and in your heart is and will always be stronger than any of those. But I have to choose me now.

As much as I want to be a superhero, I am just a mere mortal like everyone else – my heart can only take so much. It’s been broken, repeatedly. Bruised, wounded, sliced, crushed – you name it. It’s a surprise, even for me, that it’s still functioning despite everything it has gone through.

This time, I’m choosing to pick up what’s left of my heart before it shatters into a million pieces, before it becomes near impossible to put it back.

I have been so consumed by my desire for you that everything else about me seemed to have drowned. You were the ocean that I had let myself get lost into. As we made more memories together, I had fallen deeper and deeper until I lost sight of the shore, until I couldn’t remember who I was and where I was before you happened.

You have no idea how far I am willing to go for you. And it terrifies me – what I’m willing to trade, how much of myself I would be willing to hurt just so you wouldn’t. I would give you all of me without leaving anything for myself. When the time comes that we arrive at that fork on the road, how am I supposed to go my own way when I’ve already lost my own self?

Every decision I made for my life, the entirety of you had always been taken into account. But how can I build a future with you when we don’t even have the same version of it?

Believe me when I say this is probably the most difficult and painful decision I ever had to make. It hurts me to choose myself, and to come to that realization doubles it. When has it ever been wrong and unsettling to put myself first? Why does it feel like a sin to want to save myself from an unimaginable pain?

I owe myself the humility to accept what can and can’t be. But more importantly, I owe myself the honesty to admit that probably my best days yet were the days we spent together – whether we were just exchanging messages from morning ’til night, sending funny videos to make the other laugh, giving each other little gifts, planning our next adventure, or those late night conversations in the car where every secret is safe from the outside world. There was never a moment wasted on you, even if those moments were composed of long stretches of silence. Being with you was enough justification.

Lastly, I owe you an apology; Not for my intense emotions for you but for the fact that I cannot handle it with the current set-up we have. If only it were an ideal world where it was as easy as ABC to separate friendship from something more, then I wouldn’t have the need to choose between loving myself or loving you. But this is reality – and no matter how hard I try, I just can’t.

If this decision hurts you, please know that it’s a hundredfold for me. If this decision makes you sad, please know that it’s devastating for me. But I need to be strong because after everything I’ve put myself into, I deserve to have that strength.

All I’m asking is for you to understand why I’m doing this, and not to blame yourself for anything. This is all on me because I chose to love with you, without any regrets.

But this time, this time, I’m finally choosing to love myself.