There will always be people in your life who never deserved to know you on the level they did. The kind of people who never deserved the pedestal you put them on and probably will never deserve it. And there will come a point when they’ll make you question your own worth, and you will regret letting them into your world.

You will remember all the red flags you chose to ignore and all the ways you abused your own heart. How you were not authentic to your own soul. How you betrayed yourself all this while. And with every bone, you will want to do something. Take action.

If you’re at that point—the breaking point—make sure to cut them off from your life. At least for a while. And not let them have any more access to you. Meanwhile, or in the months to come, become unreachable to them and go far from their grasp. Meet new people, do more things. Have goals. Grow so much as a person that they regret how they treated you—and who they were—when they knew you. The old you.

Because this new you, is not what they’ve known. This new you, they’ll never know. Because you will never let them.

When you put someone on a pedestal, it gets harder to accept a shift in their opinion about you. And it hurts to see their disregard for how you feel. And when you realize that’s happening, the pedestal needs to disappear or they’ll never know and your emotions will keep bleeding.

Become conscious of your pedestals and the people you put onto them. Of course, you’ll never know people’s true intentions. You’ll never know when or how or why people will change. You’ll never know tomorrow. But you still need to be thoughtful about where you put your expectations and be true to yourself.

Building walls around your heart can seem to help. But it doesn’t really work that way! Because any wall can come crashing down — people have that power. At the end of the day, all you can do is trust. Be cautious, but trust. It’s a paradox of its own kind. Tricky. But that’s life—tricky. All you can do is take things as they come and live them.