Trying To Move On? Read This.

Once, in an anti-smoking ad, producers sent kids to the streets on a smoke break.

They smoked faked cigarettes around adults that were on a smoke break as well. Nearly every single adult was bewildered by what they were seeing, and told them to stop. When the kids asked why they should stop, the adults said, “Because it’s bad for you.” And the kids responded, “Then why do you do it?”

Now that is a good ad. It gets the message across clearly and very effectively, but more importantly, it illustrates a very familiar human concept:

That many things are easier said than done.

Not swearing in fits of rage, not eating food we know is bad for us but tastes so, so good, and lastly, walking away from something we know is bad for us.

One thing I’ve been hearing about since my entrance into womanhood, and a thing that I have certainly experienced for myself at one time or another, is how hard it can be to move on from someone that does us no good whatsoever.

The tough part of this whole thing is that once someone enters into your life, it is next to impossible to imagine a life without them. Not everyone can be so easily dismissed.

What if the smoker never picked up the first cigarette?

A lot of people think that moving on is the part where you’re just over someone. You’re over their ways, your over their words, and you’re just so fed up. But that, simply, is just being over someone.

Moving on is different because you get to a place where you genuinely wish the best for this person. It might even mean smiling at them finding love with someone other than you. But most of all, it’s being at peace.  Peace with the past, peace with the present, and peace within yourself.

How does one find peace?

The best, and sometimes the only way to find peace, is to give it time. It is the most dramatic and cliché saying and suggestion, but that’s because it is deeply rooted in truth.

In many ways, a broken heart is like a wound. Sometimes it’s so deep and so internal you don’t even know it’s there. But after a while, the pain becomes unbearable, and you finally realize it. It then turns into a scar or a cut, and while it can be so present for the first little while, time passes and it slowly starts to fade away...

And even after it’s almost fully gone, you’ll see the little mark, the little difference between who you were then and who you are now.

Don’t be afraid to be changed by your experiences. Don’t apologize for being more careful. And don’t apologize for the steps you took to grow. You are the result of your life experiences.

But being bitter about the past is perhaps one of the most toxic ways to be. It disables us from truly basking in the greatness that is our present, even if it doesn’t feel so great at times, or ever. Because greatness doesn’t come from what we have. It doesn’t come from our luxuries or our ability to fulfill our materialistic desires.

Instead, greatness comes from being at peace. It comes from knowing that even if you were stripped of all that you had, you would still be at peace because of the greatness that lives within you.

So, if the greatness lies within us, why are we so caught up with people who only seem to take it away?

Simple.

We have not realized our greatness yet.

And to you, I say that you are worth the discovery of your greatness. And you’re certainly worth the discovery of your peace. You do not need to exhaust yourself with the process of trying to extract blood from a stone or assign meaning to things you know will mean nothing in the end.

You’re better than empty words and broken promises and repeated mistakes.

The good news is that you can still love a person and get over them, and you can still love someone and move on. But hate fits nowhere. Because all hate means is that a part of you is angry at the person, the situation, or yourself. And frankly, all three things go hand in hand.

Fill yourself with love. Look for love and light in everything that you do and everyone that you meet. Smile when you want to frown and be thankful when you feel there is nothing left.

I know it sounds like the most abstract and indirect route to getting to the place you know you need to arrive at, but there really is no final destination. Just a journey. And you ought to keep an eye out for the beautiful things you’ll see along the way.

So what if the smoker never picked up the first cigarette?

They would not have learned the beautiful lesson in finding the strength within themselves to conquer something they once felt they couldn’t.

How Do You Know When to Walk Away?

Over the summer, I had a conversation with a girl I had only known as an acquaintance. We got into a pretty deep discussion about the idea of limits. She was trying to decipher when she was going to leave her boyfriend who she loved so much, but felt he was not treating her the way she desired (or deserved).

After explaining her situation to me, she let out a big hopeless sigh and asked, “When do I know it’s time to walk away?”

I looked at her, not with pity, sorrow, or sympathy. But instead, with belief. And I said this:

“If you’re still with him, it means you’re not done yet. It means you still have something left to give, and you love him enough to give it to him. So stay.”

She looked a little confused, hopeful almost, for more. Luckily, there was. Then I said this:

“But if you already see the end coming, chances are it’s coming. One day you’ll wake up and have nothing left to give him. Not in a bad way, and certainly not in terms of weakness. You’ll just be really done with him and the relationship and you’ll want better for yourself. Then, you’ll go get whatever that is.”

Two things about relationships:

It’s rarely ever the break up itself as much as it is the after effects. That’s why we get mad and dump our partners in the heat of the moment; only to rush back to them in a snotty hurry after the split up has just begun to settle in.

The relationship itself teaches us things about ourselves that we didn’t know. Sometimes finding these things out results in us and our partners being incompatible, and yet still we force our way into each other’s lives and wonder what the problem is.

The truth is that people just need to smarten up and bring their expectations back down to earth. We can’t measure emotional circumstances by time. We can’t put a deadline on when, wait for the clock to strike a certain hour before we leave, or threaten people that won’t change not because they can’t, but because they don’t want to.

It’s nonsense.

It sounds simple because it is really simple. The only thing that’s confusing about it is our emotions, and emotions will always confuse, misguide, and redirect us. But you find that equilibrium between your brain, your heart, and your gut, and you feel it out and follow it.

Don’t go comparing the new people that enter your life to the last one you had; they’ll never be the same. One might have terrible rhythm but amazing communication skills. One might not have the best sex but will do it so passionately that you’re mesmerized anyway.

As time goes on, you will learn.

You’ll learn about love, you’ll learn about life, you’ll learn things about your present partner, and you’ll probably come to understand things about your past partners that for one reason or another, you just couldn’t understand at the time.

But most of all, you’ll learn about yourself.

You’ll learn about who you really are. As close as you get to knowing, you never really know. You’re always growing and changing and evolving and opening up to life. You’ll find out what you like and what you don’t like, what you need and what you desire. The more you accomplish, the higher you’ll set the bar for yourself.

And you might even learn, as I have so many times, that after all this time, it wasn’t you.

It wasn’t your standards. No, they weren’t too high. It wasn’t that you couldn’t love him or her. It wasn’t that you weren’t good enough. It was never a matter of you two being soul mates, as opposed to two souls that just met and mated.

It was just that him, her, them and they just were not ready yet.

But maybe, you weren’t ready either.

Trust your experiences.

But more importantly, trust your gut. If there is still love and will in your heart, use it all up until there isn’t any left. And when you’re tank is all empty, go everywhere to fill it. New classes, new people, new hobbies, new alone time, new music, new writing, new books, and the list just goes on and on and on.

But never, ever, become a new you, before you try building on the foundation that was already there.

Because chances are, that foundation will fit perfectly with the life you have in store, which you will, just by grace, end up in, so long as you trust the process.

Letting Go

Everyone has that one song on their iPod that they listen to and turn all the way up.

You almost wish that everyone in your immediate area could not only hear the song, but experience the feeling that it brings to you.  You wish that at the height of the song, that one part that makes you go crazy in your head, they too, could feel. You wish they knew the hidden beauty of the beat, and the one line that you’ve repeatedly considered getting tattooed on your body. But sadly, it doesn’t happen like that. Sadder, however, is that even if they did hear the song, they might not react the way that you do. Not to that song.

All my life, I’ve been that song. That amazing sound; so worthy of a broken earpiece. And all my life, I’ve wished that people would react to me the way I react to myself.

I got a call last night at 2:00 a.m. from an on-and-off lover of 4 years. The affair began when I was a tender 17. I would stop by his house everyday to see him, because he didn’t get out much. Despite being polar opposites of each other, I thoroughly enjoyed the only quiet area of my life-him.

His life was a mess. I felt that the universe hired me to be his maid, and chase after him with a broom and dustpan for all the things he left scattered about in his life. I was the professional organizer that assisted in filing away everything from his thoughts to important documents. But I also felt that I had been chosen to be his night nurse. The one who would bandage his wounds with my love.

He has made great progress over the years. He went from being a dropout to working full-time and being in school simultaneously.

While this is all great, there are a ton of void emotional cheques that need to be deposited into the bank account that has survived on overdraft for four years. Me.

When my birthday came around this year he asked me what I wanted. And I looked at him and said, “Just take me to dinner.” He asked me if that was all and I said yes. Then he asked me why. And I said, “Because we’ve never been out to dinner together.”

The night before we scheduled our dinner, he held me close and apologized to me for absolutely everything he had ever done wrong. He had the same itemized list that I had written in my head, and scarred in my heart.

“I’m sorry for all the times I said I would call you and didn’t,” he said. “I’m sorry for leaving you when you needed me the most,” he said. “I’m sorry for not knowing how to return the love you gave me,” he said.

Then he made me a promise. “I never want to hurt you, disappoint you, or let you down again. I promise I’ll be better.”

The next day, he didn’t call, he didn’t text, and when I called to ask if we were still going out, he said no.

Despite his reason being valid, and more importantly, being true, I could not help but feel my heart break inside my chest. I felt the pain that I knew too well in the first few years of our…love. But this time, there was a greater pain within me; letting myself endure that after coming so far.

Last night when he called me, I awoke from my sleep and listened to everything he had to say. I waited patiently for the tears to come, I was ready to swallow the lump in my throat, and I had the First Aid kit ready for my heart, in case it ripped into two yet again.

But when he spoke, I felt nothing.

When he choked up, I felt nothing.

And when he apologized, I had already forgiven him.

The reason we are so afraid to walk away is because we always think we’ve come too far, when in most cases, we have come just far enough.

I felt nothing because I knew in my heart that my job here was done. I was not his maid, nor his organizer, or his night nurse. I was there to support him in his pursuit, there to cheer him on. That is why I never received his love, not the way I wanted to anyway, in return.

Because I didn’t need his love as much as he needed mine.

Now that he is where he’s supposed to be, doing what he’s supposed to be doing, one might think that this is where I take my passenger seat and enjoy the rest of the ride. But I want off, because I did my part in teaching him what I could through aiding in his elevation, and carrying him through the transition of boy to man.

But he’s still got so much to go that the universe has contracted other people, like me, to help him with each lesson. There will be someone there to teach him how to keep promises. There will be someone else to teach him how to love himself. There will be someone else to teach him how to love someone else. Then, there will be time. And time will teach him, show him, how much he should appreciate me and all of his other teachers.

We play our song over and over, anxious for someone else to hear it, when really, they don’t have the ears for it yet. We play our song so much that we doubt whether it’s a good song anymore. We think of changing the components to it. But we have to realize, we have to believe, that the song is fine; some members of the audience are just deaf.

If someone isn’t dancing to your song; it’s because they haven’t heard the music yet.

They haven’t heard the guitar in your rhythm. They can’t hear the bass in your beat. They don’t know your words, and they surely don’t know your chorus.

But you know it. You know the introduction; you know the hook, the chorus, and the bridge.

So cross over it. 

In life, you can get people to hear the music by doing one of two things. You can either sing your heart out and hope they hear it. Or...

You can turn off the music.