My mom has always said people come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. I truly think that this is a good sentiment that encompasses young adult life.
From age 18 to 25, we come in contact with many people who don’t stick around, less that stick for a while and go, and fewer that stay and are meant to be there. Not all that long ago, I discovered that one person I thought was a lifetime turned into a couple seasons. To my surprise, I quickly learned that it would not be easy to leave one another’s lives. It was absolutely impossible for us to stay away, whether to cause discontent or to just simply see each other.
Seven months ago, I lost the love of my life.
He packed up and said goodbye faster than I could wrap my head around the idea. To say that I was heartbroken was an understatement. However, I did not consider the pain and the grief that struck him as it did me. Instead, I chose to blame and to believe that he was simply out to hurt me. Later on, I realized that none of this was the case. Yes, we did many things to one another that were uncalled for, or simply out of sheer spite, yet it was evident that we were vying for the attention of one another.
Seven months later and we still would get the sick feeling when we saw each other in public. In his case, it would be anger, and in mine, sadness. The reason that I’m choosing to share this today is because despite all of the awful things that happened over the summer, the childish behaviors, and the hurt, I still wanted him to see the self-work that I put in over that time period as well.
After the initial shell shock of it all, I took a stance to do better for me. I took the time to look inside myself and find what I was missing. Something that I thought I had before, but quickly realized I was without all along. Self-identity is a hard hurdle to jump over, especially at such a young age.
Our 20’s are the most confusing, stressful and artificial years of life for many. I’m accepting confusing and stressful, but in this time of self-realization, I came to the conclusion that I was no longer going to live artificially.
The traditional way of life is fine for some, but I want more than just a steady job after graduation in my hometown. I want to travel and take risks and feel stranded. The beauty of this is that I would’ve never come to this conclusion if it weren’t for the same person who left and destroyed my heart.
He’d always been the person to instill this adventurous value within my life. He knew what he wanted and that was the most out of this beautiful life. I envied his passion and his willingness to step out of the box with no fear of opinions of others.
I was such a cookie cutter human who thought that the chronological order of life was important, yet I yearned for more than that, always living in fear of what others or my parents might think. Luckily, he opened my eyes to all of this, and I sat and silently cheered for him to do amazing things, even if it was without me.
A cliché that I like to live by is if you love someone, let them go. If it is meant to be, they’ll come back to you. I kept this and a hundred other breakup songs close by for the time that we were apart. I was happily doing things for me, planning adventures, and making strides in my own life when things started to fall back into place.
By no means am I saying that I couldn’t do it without him, because I was very capable of that, however, I couldn’t describe the sense of happiness and love that filled my heart when we decided to give it another go.
Sometimes life brings you in different directions, and that’s okay. You may not see the purpose or the point right then, but things truly do happen for a reason. Call it a higher power or whatever it may be, but I know that I wouldn’t have realized the things that I did, or become who I am without the time that I had to figure it out on my own.
The harsh truth is that no one can love you the way you should be loved until you love every single part of yourself. If I could sum up life with any great lesson I’ve learned thus far, it would be to learn to love your whole self, your insides, your outsides, your mind, and your soul.
Remember that your soul is delicate – treat it so. Don’t let anyone blind you to your beauty. Your mind is the most valuable thing you own, so do just that. Own it.
