When It’s Over – Let It Go 11

You can’t make someone love you and you can’t make someone fall out of love with you.
If you recognize these facts it’ll make breaking up easier.  (This message is for some folks I know who are struggling with recent and not-so-recent fissures.)

When it’s over – let it go.  Giving the departed your time, listening to their diatribes, trying to make them understand you, needing to get them told…all of these things mean that you are still tied in to them emotionally.  And the departed one knows this and will play you like a violin to keep you engaged or just to mess with and manipulate you. 

Don’t be a puppet. Let it go.

The Lady Chablis played by Chablis Deveau in the film Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil said a line that packs a punch and has helped me ever since I heard her utter it.  In the movie, she credits this line to her mother – “two tears in a bucket, mother fuck-it.”  This makes a whole lot of sense to me.

Cry a little bit, rant if you must,  and let it go, i.e., fuck it.

Don’t return to a former lover just because you’re lonely.  If he  has done nothing to change, to curry favor, to ask forgiveness – why go there?  What message do you think you are sending?  The one I’ve seen women send loud and clear is “you’re okay just the way you are, asshole, and I’m not.”  “I’m so needy I’ll take the crumbs you’re giving.” 

Don’t be afraid to be alone.  You need to be comfortable in your own skin by your damn self before you can fully be ready for or in a positive relationship.  You also need to heal from the one that broke up.

Hang up on the arsehole who calls to berate you or bait you.  You have that power.

Stop trying to make someone who doesn’t love you any more understand you.  It’s okay not to be understood – in fact, to be understood by someone else is a rare and precious thing.  Stop expecting it.  Why do you need someone who isn’t in your life anymore to understand you?

Stop second guessing your decision to be out of the relationship, as in, “he really wasn’t so bad after all.” 
Yes, he was, that’s why the relationship ended.

Give yourself five minutes, ten minutes tops,  to have your daily anger or pity party and then move on powerfully throughout the rest of your day.  In this difficult world, we need to be free and clear for love that’s grand; this cannot be achieved if you’re still dangling a foot, a heart, a brain, and your precious time with the old.

There is always another train coming when you’re ready to ride.  In the meantime, better to be fully alone and whole with a world of opportunities and possibilities, than to be less of who you should be allowing yourself to stay tied to your used to be.