Some people you’ll date will be wonderful and amazing and everything that you could’ve dreamed of.

And then they’ll end it with you. Shattering your life into a million pieces and leaving you to pick it up and put it back together. 

And then there will be people that you’ll date that will be wonderful and amazing and everything that you could’ve dreamed of.

Until you realize that you’re not supposed to be with them. Until you realize it’s time to walk away. Until you realize it’s best to hold onto that heart and keep it intact before another person shatters it.

This is not an essay about love and how to find it. This is not about how horrible breakups are.

This is about truth in walking away.

This is the truth about wanting to love and wanting to feel, but knowing that the person you want that with is just not going to work. This is about walking away and not feeling regret for it. This is about the people you leave.

Some people you will leave and it will feel like maybe you weren’t ready for someone at all, but then you realize that isn’t the case. You just weren’t ready to deal with someone that wasn’t ready for you. You weren’t ready to deal with the slow and steady rejection someone was dishing out because you were convenient to them. You’ve been ready all this time. You’ve been ready, but you know that you owe it to yourself to let yourself live before you meet someone who is ready, too.

Some people you leave will make you feel crazy with your second guessing and investigating. Some people will bring out insecurities that live deep down inside of you. Some people will make you question yourself. Some people will allow you to drift away from your ideas of what is normal. Some people will make you think this is all normal, when it’s far from it.

Some people will take up space in your brain. Some people will induce anxiety that is so bad that you feel physical pain. Some people will proliferate fears you didn’t think you were supposed to have when you were with someone that was supposed to care about you. Some people will drain you of your creativity. Some people will drain you of everything that’s made you who you are in order to suit their needs. Some people will allow you to give too much.

And some people you can leave and simply feel completely disconnected from them. And you’ll wonder if you really cared about them at all in the first place, or if they were just a place holder for your brain. If they were just someone that took up space, someone to think about, someone to plan for and live for, but not someone that could ever make your heart full. And because of this realization, you’ll leave them with confidence, forgetful of those fluttery feelings of happiness they used to leave you. For you, it’s just a memory. A memory you can easily let go of.

Some people will make you realize what you need. Some people will teach you. Some people will make you hate those lessons, but you swallow them up anyways. Absorb it all. You will learn and you will grow.

And then you’ll realize that all this time, while it may have felt like it was wasted, it was actually the best thing to happen to you. You realize you needed to make those mistakes, otherwise you would just continue in your naivety, and no one wants that. You experience all this stuff, until you graduate from it and you’re ready to walk.

So you walk away. You say the words, “Let’s break up.” Your mind will move on faster than you thought. But it’s not like it didn’t hurt for you. It did. It hurt a lot, but you also hurt a lot over the time you were together. So that final goodbye is less heartbreak for you, and more so your freedom to live and love yourself again. That final goodbye is less heartbreak for you, because you’ve been living with the gradual cracks that person left you. So you move on. And it feel so. damn. good. And part of you will feel horrible for this. You will feel horrible because you are a good person deep down inside. You feel horrible because you’d never wish ill will on the other person, you would never want them to hurt. But you walk away with your head held high because you know that they are no good for you. You walk away with you head held high because there is so much more of the world to see.