During my first semester of college, you were kind enough to add to the chaos that ruled my life.

I wasn’t your girlfriend unless it was just the two of us in the room. I had to beg you to tell your friends that we were together; mine we already sick of hearing about you at that point. And I bet your family still doesn’t know, nor will they ever.

You seldom let me hug you in public, and holding your hand was out of the question nine times out of ten. I secretly loved when you were drunk because that was when you let me kiss you that first time. That was when you let me reach for your arm, but I know now that was only because you couldn’t walk straight.

You led me to believe that you wanted me long-term. But we lasted for just three weeks after months of you touching my body and my heart without strings attached. You left me, and it wasn’t like I could just walk away without a problem. I had to uproot a routine that had become so familiar in a world around me that was so new and always changing. I had to move clear across campus, further away from my classes and all of my friends.

After all that, it still took months to wash the scent of you out of my sheets and off of my skin. I slipped up a few times and texted you questions you couldn’t answer. The last of those times, you gave your high school best friend my number so she could tell me to go away because you didn’t have the guts to say it yourself.

You would think that I have so many reasons to hate you. And maybe you’d have been right about that a few months ago. But I know that being the woman I am now, I’m so much better than that.

I’m not writing this for anyone’s sympathy. I know that I’m not special for getting my heart broken. It happens to countless people every day all over the world. So I don’t deserve any pity for being knocked down. But what I find really admirable is a person who summons the strength from within to get back up and stay up. I know that that’s exactly what I did and it doesn’t matter if anyone else notices that in me because I do. I notice it every day.

I dusted myself off after months of mourning my own loss. I wanted to make up for the time I’d spent hating myself and loving you. I decided that I wanted to take my life back and love myself and not think about you at all.

And I swear, for something that almost killed me, I’d never felt more alive.

No one ever believes that they can have their perspective on life change until it does; only then does it hit you and make you realize just how much power you have over yourself. When you give other people the capacity to make or break you, you’re setting yourself up to be torn down. I let you take root in my brain and, for a while, you were the constant thought in my mind, the headache that never went completely away.

I can handle being blamed for falling for you in the first place. I can put up with people criticizing me for dating you. I can take every "I told you so" from my friends back home. I can swallow all of this down no matter how much it hurts, and you better believe I'm using it all to build myself up to new heights.

In all of these words, I'm telling you that I don't need you, I never did need you, and I will never again play the role of the victim when I get my heart broken. It took you nearly destroying me for the message to finally sink in. So with my old self's dying breath, I say thank you.

Thank you for hurting me so badly that I stripped off the worst parts of myself to become stronger than I've ever been.