When living abroad, saying goodbye becomes a part of life. Of course, saying goodbye does not always have to be a bad thing; or example getting rid of bad habits and friends that are holding you back. However, saying goodbye to good friends again and again can be extremely disheartening.
After five years of living abroad I have come to learn the hard way that some things in life are not meant to last, and that that can be a good thing. With every relationship, romantic or platonic, you will learn something new. It will add something to you as a person and ultimately help you along in your journey. Dreams and goals can change and things might not turn out they way you plan at all, but you will always find new things that make life exciting again.
Getting your heart broken is inevitable. It feels awful, but in the end it is just a necessary part of life to help you grow a thicker skin. However cliche it might sound, what doesn’t kill you does make you stronger after all. Not to say that saying goodbye to good friends year after year gets any easier; and it might leave you jaded and unwilling to forge new relationships with people that are “leaving soon” as to save you from future heartache. This, however, will only lead to loneliness and regret.
Photo by Kristina Tripkovic on Unsplash
I used to let people go early. Stop talking and making plans when the time to say goodbye drew closer. I tricked myself into thinking that it would somehow make it less painful if I made myself care less before it was too late, – because I would never see them again anyway. But the truth is that nothing changed; I felt just as sad when they left. The only difference was that I lost the chance to say goodbye properly. It took me a while to realize it, but letting people in and enjoying the time that you do have is way more rewarding than the price of protecting one’s heart. After all, as a good friend once told me, just because you can’t see someone anymore does not mean that that friendship had ended. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes they do after a while, and that is ok too. But more often than not as we grow older our friendships can survive for weeks, months and even years without much communication. Some relationships just somehow survive anyway.
This is not to say that it does not get lonely from time to time. It can feel like a struggle to have to start again and make new friends all the time. The lonely truth of being an expat is after all, that making internationally minded friends means saying goodbye a lot. It might be painful and feel like something you want to avoid. You might try your hardest to hang on to the friendships you have and avoid new ones as to not get hurt again, but shutting people out does nothing to protect you; it only hurts you more in the end. One of the most wonderful part of living abroad is the amazing people that you meet, and the journey that you get to go on with every twist and turn. You end up learning so much about yourself and others, and even if things don’t turn out they way you might have planned, it is almost always certainly worth it in the end.
I have not yet mastered this art, but I am getting better at it as time goes on. Learning how to love openly and freely even if you don’t know how it will end is a struggle. But in the end, the friendships, the experiences and the memories that you make along the way all somehow end up being worth it, even if you had to say goodbye a lot to get there.