I Wish You Roses: The Pain of Letting People Go

“I never thought that I’d be without you

I wish you love, I wish you well,

I wish you roses while you can still smell them“

-Kali Uchis

Letting someone go is one of the hardest things we face. It’s never just about the decision; it’s about the emotions and struggles that come with it. In this post, I’m sharing the real, messy side of these moments and how you can move forward.

You go online these days and everyone is preaching cutting people off; when to do it and how to do it. Even I do the same. What people do not preach, however, is the pain you go through and how to cope with it, what they don’t tell you is that it’s difficult to let people go but its even more difficult to cope or put up with the ‘withdrawal symptoms’, as I like to call them.

Hold on. Let me cook.

Of course, once you get out of an abusive relationship, verbal, physical or mental, the relief is sudden but there is still a dark part of you that certainly can’t recover as soon as you leave. When your friend betrays you, stabs you like they were roman senators and you were Julius Caesar, you eventually fight and let them go for the sake of your mental health but after?? How do you feel? Do you reckon you’d feel good?

There are times when we hate those people, as much as we hate to admit it and that’s completely alright. There’s actually nothing wrong with missing something that’s harmful as long as we stick to our decision not to go back to it. There are also days when we think about our time with those people; the good memories of the moments we made together and we proceed to miss them genuinely. Sometimes we even forget what these people did to us and we want to go back to them and to that situation and it’s okay to feel like that because it is in our nature as humans and just like I mentioned earlier, what matters most is that we do not look back.

What happens when you look back or reach out to these people is that you will feel good in the initial stages but after sometime, you will be reminded of the very reason you decided to wish them well and leave. Quite frankly, no one should be reminded of their past traumas, which is why you need to learn how to love from a distance; learn to wish people well without actually being with them.

Withdrawal symptoms, as I like to call them, are a bit of a problem; you start to feel lonely, like there’s a huge void in your heart you can’t fill, you may or may not cry, lose your appetite for food and your zeal to do your daily activities but do not beat yourself up for it. The fact that you are not on talking terms with said person does not mean you must hate them or hold a grudge or even bad mouth them, as society so likes to preach, what you most definitely need not do is dragging your friends into it. How are you going to drag your friends into an argument they have nothing paying heed to? If you think about it, it’s not fair to them, neither is it fair to yourself.

Don’t let the pain you feel delude you into thinking your feelings are an abomination or that you need to hate someone if you genuinely do not. Focus on yourself and on your healing journey; your baby girl or baby boy era and let your love show. YOU ARE NOT A BAD PERSON, YOU’RE JUST HURT. Don’t let it get to your head. So wish people roses from afar and be your own chill person.

I’m not a guru, just a chill girl trying to let go of my pain.