Defne YucesoyEven though you accept what has happened, there is a part of you deep inside where you believe things should have worked out differently. This part of you replays conversations, reimagines endings and holds tightly onto the idea that maybe if something was timed differently, said or done differently things wouldn’t have fallen apart like they did. Life does not work that way. You can’t go backward. At some point you stop asking “Why?” and focus on the more important picture : you’re still here.
At first being alone does not feel empowering at all. It feels quiet in a bad way. It feels like everybody had a guidebook to share their thoughts with but you didn’t. You miss having someone make you feel like things are more certain and stable. You try to find “that” person that will guide you through your hardest times and make you feel like you can achieve anything.
Without that everything feels unfamiliar at first, even yourself. That is exactly where the mind shift begins.
When there’s not someone to lean on, you realize how much you are actually capable of doing on your own. Not in some life changing dramatic moment of course but you realize it steadily, slowly. You realize it on the day you thought you wouldn’t be able to get through but did, in the way you make your own decisions without reassurance and trust your own judgement.
You realize that you are not as lost as you thought. Perhaps not lost at all. You’re just unused to leaning against your own pillar. Learning isn’t that easy.
Learning means sitting with your own thoughts and dealing with them instead of avoiding them, it means not running back with teary eyes because you need closure or reassurance, it comes with every choice you make without them. This is the most important part that should be underlined with a bold red pen: becoming someone who can stand alone without feeling incomplete. Not because you don’t value connection, but because you don’t need someone to feel as a whole.
There will be days where you miss what you had. You will also have days where you’re doubting yourself about whether letting go was the right choice or not, but those days won’t define you any longer. This is because in between those tough moments you will have sunny days , perhaps unnoticeable ones, where you feel okay again. The days you laugh until your stomach hurts, where you remind yourself aren’t stuck in the past, where you get a good score on a test, where it feels like it belongs to you again. Those moments will slowly start to grow.
Until one bright day you’ll realize that what once felt like everything had collapsed and was the end of everything is actually a new beginning of something you needed more. What you needed was a version of yourself that doesn’t rely on anyone else to feel complete.
That’s when it clicks. Every little thing is going to be alright. Not because everything turned out how you planned but because you understand that everything doesn’t need to turn out the way you planned to in order to exist.
You learn to love yourself , choose yourself. And once you do that, you don’t just survive being alone. You become someone who is never lost in it.
