Friendships and relationships, these connections make life meaningful. Even when these relationships end, the love does not go away overnight. Letting go is hard, but it’s a part of life. Throughout your life, you will be in relationships or friendships where you may depend on the other person or people, and you may be too dependent. In this blog piece, I will be sharing some words of wisdom that will hopefully help people going through similar situations.
My advice to you is that during the beginning of a relationship, the middle, or even before the relationship starts, if that person left tomorrow, you could go back to being by yourself. You could survive, even if it hurt you tremendously, you could figure it out. It may sound corny or even cringey, but it’s the reality. When being in relationships, people tend to get very dependent, they build up a foundation with that person. Let’s think of the foundation as a tower. When in a relationship like these, where you’re dependent, the foundation is now being built by two people and it is now dependent on both people. Say that the other person leaves, what happens to the foundation that was dependent on both people? What happens to the tower? What happens to the relationship that you built? It falls apart. Everything falls apart. You’re alone. You’re vulnerable. It feels horrible, it seems as if you are at rock bottom. This is one of the worst feelings that you can feel, but to every bad thing, there is a good thing. There is always a lesson to these experiences. Although it may not seem like it, you learn from these situations so that you won’t make the same mistake again.
Over time, you begin to heal. Everyday you get better and better, you get more confident. You start to process and understand why things turned out the way that they did. You eventually reach a point where you start to rebuild the foundation, the tower, by yourself. At this point you are not dependent on anyone other than yourself. Let’s say that you eventually meet someone. Their foundation begins to build alongside yours, even if they leave, your foundation will not fall apart. You have learned to value yourself. This is the point that I want to get across. While being in relationships like these, you need to value yourself before all else now, I am not saying that you can not let yourself be vulnerable or loved, but the love that you have for yourself must be superior to the love that you have for the other person. Being put into situations like these take a big toll on your mental health which is a part of the reason why I wanted to share about this. Letting go is not easy, it is one of the hardest things that you can do, but being relieved from all that pressure makes you feel extremely better afterwards. YOU should be the most important person in YOUR life.
Emily Diaz – St. Ignatius College Prep – DMSF Class of 2027