“Now make sure you take these twice a day for ten days.”

This is what you’re commonly told as the doctor hands you a prescription for antibiotics. At the time, you may feel so awful from your sickness that NOT taking them sounds absurd. However, in a couple days when you feel better, it gets difficult to remind yourself to take them. You’re no longer plagued by a congested nose or sore throat so you’re basically cured right? Wrong. The virus is still alive and well inside you. It is just waiting for the opportunity when your immune system is once again weak without the aid of antibiotics. You need to take ALL of your antibiotics in order to completely rid yourself of the virus.

Antibiotics don’t solely possess a medical connotation. In fact, they are necessary in our day to day interactions and relationships. And no, they don’t come in pill form. Your antibiotics in your daily life entail how you deal with toxic relationships.

In life, you find that you sometimes cannot understand why you are drawn to people that continually hurt you. Despite knowing that you deserve better, you continually go back to this person. You try to distance yourself, knowing that you need to let yourself heal. You promise yourself you’ll limit contact in order to get over them, but a few days into your “dosage” you find yourself reaching for your phone to shoot them a text. You desperately want to know how they’re doing or if they’re just as hurt as you.

Or, you’re in a different situation: You’re feeling better, and you are thinking that you actually might be able to get over them when your phone lights up and it’s their contact name. Just as it’s easy to forget to take your antibiotics, it’s incredibly easy to become vulnerable to a person again.

When you start feeling better is when you are at your weakest. The virus is still lurking, waiting to attack when you let your guard down. This is the moment when you need to ensure that you keep taking your daily dosage. This might come in the form of blocking their number on your phone, unfollowing them on social media or limiting contact with them. This may seem completely childish, but it is absolutely necessary to get away from a toxic relationship and the aftermath.

It takes time to heal from a sickness, and it takes time to heal from a toxic relationship. However, it will take even longer if you continually allow yourself to fall victim to manipulation. Believe it or not, you are strong enough to close a door on a relationship that limited you as a person. So follow the doctor’s orders, and take your antibiotics. Even when you start feeling better.