If He’s Already Left, You Need To Ghost Him For Good

There’s a bittersweet sadness in moving on. It’s a quiet, stony, unmitigated and sometimes upsetting realization that you are supposed to move forward. You don’t always like it, but you have to.

There are times when it’s okay, even fun. It’s thrilling and exciting.

You meet new people who ignite new things in you. They remind you you’re not dead inside. You’re not a shell or a husk waiting to be blown away in the hot summer wind, but a vibrant streak of color waiting to leave your mark on this big wide world.

Other times it’s going to carve your heart out. You will feel a dull, gutting electricity vibrating down into your gut, driving your fingers to your phone, to your keyboard, to every facet of communication you have:

Text him.

Email him.

Instagram him.

Check all of his accounts.

The voices will murmur until maybe you do, but I advise you don’t because he’s gone and hurting yourself isn’t going to bring him back.

While you’re busy dwelling on what you want and what was, he’s busy moving forward and there’s no reason you should rub your own nose in that.

It will feel like it’s still your business for a while, and that is why you will want to look, why you will want to check your phone 500 times each day to see if he’s reached out, and why it will feel like a small twisting knife each time you see he hasn’t. Maybe you were so intertwined you will want to look for weeks or months after you have parted ways, but you have to remind yourself you are not one another’s problem anymore. His business is not yours, and yours is not his. If he wanted you, he’d say something.

Moving forward will still feel unnatural, and this unnaturalness will go back and forth between feeling thrilling and nauseating.

For how long, I wish I could tell you. Perhaps it depends on the depth of your love or the length of your plans, the fullness of your commitment or the sheer unwillingness to accept a future you once had planned for yourself no longer is. Whatever it is, even though it doesn’t seem like it now, it will pass. Sometimes it will pass in a few days, if you’re lucky. If you’re not lucky, it may take a few years and you’ll just have to make peace with the fact that there’s nothing wrong with having loved a person with so much of yourself its taking this long to let go.

Eventually though, no matter how long it takes, you have to take the first step. You have to remind yourself that just because somebody chose a life without you in it doesn’t mean your life isn’t worth living to the fullest.

Go. Leave. Get out there and show the world everything about yourself they were unwilling to appreciate, to blind to see, or unbothered to love. Be you. Be unapologetically you in your quest to find yourself, friendship, love, and everything that will make your life uniquely complete in the wake of the torment that love lost can be.

Move on.

Not because you have to, but because you deserve to.