Day 22: In Chapter Sixteen, I discuss “Why We Cling to People Who Don’t Love Us.” Talk about a time when you clung to someone who didn’t love you, why you think you had such a hard time letting go, and how you finally tapped into your inner “enough-ness” to walk away.
I used to always have a hard time letting things go. It didn’t matter if it was a person, a job, something I owned, my feelings toward a situation, etc., I just couldn’t always shake them. I’m such a perfectionist sometimes, almost to a fault. I don’t like quitting anything until I’ve tried everything I possibly can to make it work. This has proved true time and time again throughout my past.
Touching on perfectionism, I will say that this blog challenge has most certainly become quite a challenge for me. I feel like some of the topics are a little repetitive for me because I don’t feel like I’ve fully lived enough life to have different experiences to write about, and it frustrates me sometimes. That’s where my negative self-talk tries to come in, and I have to do my best to whisk it away. Suffice it to say that I feel like I’ve already been pretty open about my struggles with letting someone go who didn’t love me back. In regards to that particular situation, I’ve realized now that I wasn’t so sure I loved him back either towards the end. I think I clung more onto the idea of what we used to have and just the idea of being in a relationship altogether. It wasn’t necessarily him because I knew that we both deserved better than we were attempting to give each other at the time, even though it took us awhile to admit that to ourselves.
I think, as human beings, we cling to the things that are familiar and safe to us because we fear the unknown. We get so accustomed to people, places, and things that trying to imagine our lives without them seems impossible. Back then, the thought of being alone absolutely terrified me, so I used that as my reasoning to stay in a relationship that was not adding any value to my life anymore. I essentially convinced myself that I would rather stay suffering in a toxic relationship instead of finding the strength and the courage to break free of it. Deep down, I knew I was meant for something so much greater than what I allowing for myself at the time, but I had lost my identity in that relationship and had no idea how I was going to find it once I got out. The fear and uncertainty of my future consumed my mind, and I allowed it to hold myself back from living up to my greatest potential.
Letting go of things in life is one of the hardest lessons we’ll ever have to learn. It takes a conscious effort to choose to put yourself first and say goodbye to toxic people, places, and things that are depriving you of your happiness. Once you finally start letting all of that go, you realize that it becomes easier to reject all of that negativity and toxicity. You start catching glimpses of the good, positive things that await you on your journey ahead, and you’ll find yourself looking back at that rearview mirror less and less as time goes on.
You have to let go of your past to make way for your future. It’s the only way you’ll grow.
La Bella Vita 