You shouldn’t place so much pressure on yourself to move on from people who have left you.
People leave. That’s just a random fact of life that we all must learn to accept. We can’t be so childish and naïve as to believe that all the people who walk into are lives are there to stay forever. People leave. And we have to brace ourselves for that if we don’t want to bear with the pain of being blindsided. But the pain is still going to be there whether you expect it or not.
And there are many layers to that pain. It’s not a simple kind of pain that can only be attributed to one aspects of being abandoned and left behind. Not only will you be bearing with the pain of losing someone who means a lot to you; but you will also be forced to bear with the fact that just because they’re physically absent, they maintain a strong emotional presence in your life – sometimes, even long after they’ve gone.
They stay there and they are always reminding you of the time that you lost them. They remind you of everything – all of the wounds that you got when they left you behind. They remind you of all the emotions that you felt – the pain, the anger, the bitterness, angst, the disbelief, the confusion, and the loneliness. All of the wounds reopen themselves on a consistent basis every time you think of them. And you can’t stop thinking of them because they’re still in your heart. You realize that even though they’re no longer in your life, the remnants of their persona still remain – and you still have to bear with these remnants to the best of your abilities; no matter how painful they might be to entertain.
Not to say that you’re alone in this. EVERYONE has experienced some form of abandonment at one point or another. So you definitely won’t have any trouble trying to get people to empathize with you. People understand the gravity of your situation. People understand the struggles that you’re going through. And the most experienced will tell you this one little secret – you’re never really going to be able to let go of the person who just got away; the one who slipped from your grasp. There’s no moving on from that in any capacity.
It’s perfectly reasonable as to why you just can’t seem to move on from this person. When you invest so much of yourself in someone; in the relationship that you have, then it makes sense for you to never be okay when they choose to leave you behind. Because when they left, they took that part of you along with them. And with that abandonment, they made you feel incomplete.
They took a huge chunk of your heart and they ran with it. And so it’s understandable that you would never really be whole again after that. That’s the risk that you run when you fall in love with someone. You try so heard to pick up the pieces of your broken heart, but the break was just too much for you to be able to fully recover from. You were drowning and there wasn’t a lifeboat in sight. You tried so much to keep yourself afloat, but their absence served as an anchor that kept you from getting back to the surface.
They say that time heals all wounds but that’s just plain foolishness. To some extent, some wounds cauterize and bruise. But that doesn’t mean that they heal completely. Wounds don’t just vanish into thin air no matter how much time may elapse. It could be days, weeks, months, and even years; but you will always find some pain whenever you revisit that traumatic experience of abandonment. All it takes is a little trigger; and the wounds will remind you of the wounds of yesterday. And they will seem as fresh as ever.
And that’s okay. That’s fine. You shouldn’t place so much pressure on yourself to move on from people who have left you. In fact, you should stop trying s hard to stop loving the people who abandoned you. You loved them for a reason; and while the circumstances may change, the reasons always remain constant.
You may not necessarily be in love with the person that they became, but you once loved the idea of who they used to be, and that should be enough for you to keep. You shouldn’t have to let go of that. No one should ever expect you to let go of that. Remember that your life is a direct result of your own choices; and your choices are shaped by your experiences. If you let go of your past, you let go of your sense of self. So yes, people always leave. But that doesn’t mean that you have to forget that they ever existed to you.