One of the hardest things for me is letting people go. If it’s a friend or someone I’m in a relationship with, it hurts a lot. For years, I stayed friends with people that only made me feel worse than I was already making myself feel. An example I have is of a friend I made back in high school. This girl, I thought was my soulmate (the friend kind of way, because YES those exist, at least to me). We had kind of the same taste in music (the generic pop), which has always been important to me, good taste in music. This girl could make me laugh all the time and I loved spending time with her. As soon as we started college, things changed. I realized we weren’t as similar as I thought we were. She got friends who would do things I was not down for, she changed, and I did too. I realized all those times that she would joke around times before, she was really trying to make me feel bad, make me feel inferior. Not only that, it got to the point where she would flake on me and she completely stopped trying to stay friends. It was always me asking her to hang out, I really don’t mean to sound needy because that’s not what it was. I literally would not see her for weeks at a time. That’s how I knew I had to let her go, but it wasn’t easy. We had been best friends since freshman year of high school. We went through heartbreaks together. We went to homecoming together. But it was finally time to let her go. She left for 5 months and that made it easy to detox from that friendship. Once she came back, I kind of blindsided her with the idea that I had finally moved on from that high school friendship. That we were older now and I was not going to let her walk all over me anymore, to use me only when she needed it. And yes, it hurt, because I cared so deeply about her. I cried every time she cried, I talked on the phone whenever she felt lonely, among other things.
As I was growing up and moving from town to town, I made friends that I thought would be forever in my life, I was young and clueless because I was wrong. We all grew up and changed but so did I. After a relationship ends, you need time to process and detox and well that time is not a set amount, it is different for everyone. But if you really want to move on then you need to do a couple of things:
1. stop talking to them. This one hits home because this one is the one that I am a failure at. I keep talking to people I should not be talking to. If they hurt me, they are toxic, or we are just not good for each other anymore… Talking to them while trying to move on is not the right thing to do.
2. Have a serious legitimate time to heal. I was a failure at this too, it takes me a while to stop talking to those people and that does not help me move on. Truth is, it could have been shorter if I had stopped talking to them and stopped beating myself up for thinking about them.
3. Do not beat yourself up if you slip up. Being a caring person is not something bad, so if you feel like you REALLY need to check on them, do it. But note this is not something you want to keep doing, I do not recommend it.
4. Something that’s made it easier to let people go is I have tried to strengthen my friendship with my other two best friends (the best girls I’ve known since 6th grade). And also, with another girl I went to highschool with. They help keep my mind off people that I should let go of.