Think aloud
We often talk about breakups, but it’s almost always about the pain of being broken up with. Yes, watching someone walk away can hurt a lot, but sometimes, walking away hurts even more.
We assume that it’s easy to walk away and that it means that you don’t care about the person anymore… They’re the one who didn’t want to give up on love, while the person who left did.
It must be because that person is heartless and isn’t even capable of feeling any pain or love… If not, they wouldn’t walk away, right?
Yes, this can be true in some situations… but sometimes, you have to walk away from someone you still love and it’s something completely different.
People don’t end a relationship only when they no longer care about the person they’re with.
Sometimes, walking away is the only option because a relationship clearly has no future… or at least not a happy one.
It’s important to try to save a relationship, but sometimes you just have to save yourself instead.
When staying in a relationship comes at the price of your happiness or health, you have no choice.
No matter how much you love them, you have to leave because love just isn’t enough. We can love someone more than anything in the world, but we have to love ourselves more.
When choosing the person you love over yourself could destroy you, you must choose yourself.
If their presence in your life is making your life worse, you have to stop letting them be a part of it.
Being with them just makes you feel like you’re going to lose your sanity.
You’ve already started losing control because of them and you know that you’ll end up losing yourself if you don’t get away from them.
The relationship brings you some good things, but also much more bad ones.
You love them so deeply that you try to deny it, but you feel miserable with them.
They make you feel bad about yourself and yet you still want to be around them…
But more often than not, you just feel sad instead of happy. You still love them so much that you try to fight for your relationship.
Instead of giving up, you put an enormous amount of effort into trying to make things work…
But it becomes painfully clear that just because people love each other doesn’t mean that they will be compatible.
The two of you just couldn’t function together, no matter how much you wanted to.
Eventually, you had to accept the painful truth – some people aren’t meant to be together. As much as they love each other and try to make it work, it’s simply not meant to be.
Even after realizing that love just isn’t enough, you kept hoping and you kept trying… But one day, you just knew that you had to walk away.
The relationship was harmful to you and even toxic. No matter how much you loved each other, you knew that staying together could destroy you.
It had already started to harm your mental health, and even your physical health was in danger.
You couldn’t think, eat, or sleep anymore and the pain was very real.
The relationship made you feel terrible, but so did the decision to walk away. How to walk away from a relationship while you are still in love?
It took an enormous amount of courage to finally do it.
One day, you just turned around and walked away, feeling like you’d actually broken your own heart, not theirs.
You knew that it was the right decision and that it was the only one you could have made… But instead of feeling relieved and proud, you felt guilty.
You couldn’t stop thinking that you might have given up much too easily on the love you had.
Maybe there was something you could have or should have done to make it work?
Deep down, you knew that you’d already tried everything… but you were the one who ended things and you felt incredibly guilty because of it.
You made yourself think that you were selfish and weak.
How could you just leave him hanging instead of fighting for him?
You asked yourself that repeatedly, as if all the effort you put into trying to make things work wasn’t enough.
Maybe you could have done more, and you aren’t strong enough to deal with problems…
Feeding yourself untrue thoughts like that made you feel defeated.
You felt defeated and that instead of winning the battle you had to win, you just surrendered…
But do you know what? Love is not supposed to seem like a battle.
You loved this person, but you chose yourself instead of choosing to stay miserable with them.
You’re not selfish for thinking about your own well-being and your needs for a change.
Regardless of how guilty it made you feel, it was the right thing to do.
How could you think that you’re weak when walking away from someone you love takes incredible courage?
A weak person would just let the relationship destroy them, but you were brave enough to do the logical thing.
Regardless of how strong your feelings were, you managed to be stronger than them. You took control over your life and made the difficult choice to make it better at the price of pain.
That pain of not listening to your heart when it’s foolish is nothing compared to the pain of letting it ruin your life.
So, you let it break because you knew that it was for the best.
You thought about what was right for your future, and you gathered enough strength to choose that… even though you were aware that it would hurt in the present.
You didn’t just break up with the man you loved, you broke your heart because you knew that it was for the best.
All this means is that you’re mature enough to decide what’s right for you, even when it causes you pain.
Feeling heartbroken for a while is nothing compared to feeling unhappy for the rest of your life.
You broke your heart to stop it from forcing you to be miserable and gave it a chance to feel true happiness.
Be proud of that, because it takes incredible strength and courage!
